‘Hands Across Veronica’ at Walking Fish

Gin Hobbs’s Hands Across Veronica, first produced in 2003 and revived last month at the Walking Fish Theatre, follows this classical format—to produce not a tragedy but rather a raucous and darkly tinged feminist comedy. The subject is the modern American woman’s relationship to her body and, beyond that, the desperately unanchored way many of us live now.

Veronica (Shelli Pentimali Bookler) and her friend Aubrey (Kirsten Quinn) are obsessed with thinness and conditioning, starving themselves in search of a body— and a self— they can believe in, or at least project to the world. Veronica— Ronnie— has serial sexual relationships that last a few weeks or months at best and provide her with the illusion of company.

Heavy and happy

Aubrey has a live-in boy friend, Tony (Daniel Tobin), who wolfs down Aubrey’s calorie-counted rations, stuffs bills in the freezer of the refrigerator (it’s the production’s chief and symbolically glowering prop) and refuses to sleep with her. She is nonetheless desperate to marry him and bear his child.

The chorus consists of three generously endowed women (Shelvy Paredes, Zarah Ivins and Meryl Lynn Brown), one with a T-shirt emblazoned, “No Boyfriend No Problem” who form a counterpoint to the action rather than a commentary on it, and who sing and dance (occasionally with Ronnie and Aubrey) in musical-comedy style. Ostracized by society, they have found sisterhood among themselves as well as the self-acceptance that eludes Ronnie and Aubrey.

In one bit, they triumphantly consume a Snickers Bar after enumerating all the unwanted places its calories are likely to wind up; in another, the women use the prosthetic leg discarded by one of Ronnie’s boy friends as a combination of guitar and sex toy.

Enter the dog

The attitude is defiant; the effect is funny, shocking and ultimately sad. The chorus, for all its assertiveness, represents not an alternative to the self-destructive behavior of Ronnie and Aubrey, but that behavior turned inside out.

Tony’s response to Aubrey’s demand for marriage and a child is to buy a dog named Mitzi, which she takes as a step toward her goal. Instead, Mitzi separates them further. Tony is soon communicating largely through Mitzi in baby talk that addresses Aubrey in the third person.

Unable to challenge this situation directly, Aubrey vents her frustration and anger on Mitzi, thereby creating a new source of friction. This reaction only renders her more desperate to have someone who, as she says, “belongs” to her, and Tony has one virtue that Ronnie’s boy friends do not: He shows no inclination to move out.

Food vs. sex

Tony does have a project, which is to get Aubrey to eat. To her, this is the ultimate assault. But when Ronnie comes over for dinner (takeout, naturally), Tony tries the same tactic on her. Like Aubrey, Ronnie initially shrinks back in horror; for both women, starvation is a moral condition. But there is none of the baggage between her and Tony that there is with Aubrey, and in a moment of weakness (and desperate desire, of course, for nourishment on any and all levels), Aubrey succumbs to a forkful of rice.

From this point, Ronnie and Tony begin a relationship based on eating out together. Aubrey suspects them of having an affair. It qualifies as one, but based on food rather than sex: Tony remains chaste with Ronnie, just as he has been celibate with Aubrey. Ostensibly, he does so to avoid betraying Aubrey, but in fact what’s happening is that Ronnie has regressed to the almost infantile nurturing that Tony (seemingly happier in a maternal role than any other) provides her.

Irrelevant males

There’s a reconciliation of sorts between Ronnie and Aubrey at the end; sisterhood is powerful for them too, and although both recoil from the suggestion of a physical relationship, it is clear that they are headed for closer companionship. Tony, one suspects, will probably be happy to cook for them both, once he gets over Mitzi’s death at the hands of a finally enraged Aubrey. And if not… well, the males in this play, and the world it evokes, are supernumerary. Once a girl has finally decided to eat, it’s easy enough to dispense with them. Even Aubrey’s desire for a child comes not from the wish to start a family, but simply from the need to love something that won’t get away.

Attractively shrinking

The performers, under Hannah MacLeod’s brisk and energetic direction, are all fine, and although the nearly-two-hour action is continuous, it doesn’t flag. The play messages itself only twice. This is normally an ill-advised device, but Hobbs makes it work in a Brechtian way: A chorus member steps out at one point to observe that the human race has covered the planet with itself at the expense of other species, while the goal of at least its female members seems to be to shrink themselves to the point of nonexistence. Ronnie ruefully seconds the thought when she muses that the less of her there is, the more people seem to like her.

The truths of comedy are those of exaggeration. Happy couples do exist. But much of Hobbs’s vision of our world has a ring of authenticity. We seem a nation increasingly divided between the desperately thin and the desperately fat. We produce with reckless abandon, but no longer seem to know how to consume. We are more crowded than ever, yet we can’t seem to find each other or ourselves. Ronnie and Aubrey—and Tony, too—aren’t just caricatures; they’re figures who reflect the way we live now.