Luna Theater's "Hot 'n' Throbbing'

February, 8 2009: R & B singer Chris Brown is arrested for allegedly beating his girlfriend, internationally successful pop star Rihanna. Less than three weeks later: Rihanna refuses to testify or press charges, and takes him back. Paparazzi spot the pair relaxing on Star Island in Miami Beach.

Anyone seriously disturbed by Rihanna's actions should avoid seeing Luna's intense and surprisingly funny production of Paula Vogel's Hot 'n' Throbbing. Unlike the distant world of celebrities, Vogel's tale of misplaced affection and undeserved abuse is set in blue-collar Baltimore. Here the middle-aged Charlene (Catherine Palfenier)—a producer and screenwriter of erotica for women—works late at home on a Friday night to complete a script for a shoot the next day.

After her pervy teenage kids—the nerdy, voyeuristic Calvin (Noah Herman) and the rape-fantasy indulging Leslie Ann (Melissa Lynch)— leave, Charlene's violent ex-husband Clyde (John Lopes) violates his restraining order and breaks in. And though Charlene initially defends herself, her disgust turns to pity and then to desire. Like Rihanna, she's suddenly hot and bothered for this formerly abusive man.

Voices inside her head

As she did in her stark, barely-judgmental depiction of pedophilia in How I Learned to Drive, Vogel again pushes boundaries, infusing the horrors of abuse with moments of deadpan comedy (while getting choked from behind by his son, Clyde wonders, "Why can't I just have normal family problems?"). Like the Greek Chorus that helped narrate the emotional undertones of her earlier work, Vogel interrupts the realism of Hot 'n' Throbbing with a pair of voices— a male detective (Allen Radway, not quite convincing in his understated caricature) and a female gun moll (Kirsten Quinn)—inside Charlene's head. Early on, the pair dictate Charlene's screenplay, and later, like characters who've become directors, they control the action through flashbacks to earlier, even less happy times in Clyde and Charlene's relationship.

Nevertheless, director Greg Campbell rightly treats Vogel's play as a realistic work. He finds the absurd humor of family life in between moments that land hard punches, and lets these build slowly to a powerful conclusion that rightly terrifies. Maria Shaplin's deft lighting morphs Charlene's experience into a film-like structure, subtly hinting at Vogel's comparison of pornography and reality. The strong performances never lecture the audience.

Like Streetcar's Stella

Though Vogel treads familiar ground— the difference between what turns men and women on— it's interesting that in this Philadelphia season, the two playwrights who don't fear presenting an accurate depiction of the darker recesses of human hetero-sexual desire are both homosexual. In the Walnut's recent staging of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, Stella glosses over Stanley's abuses by saying "there are things that happen between a man and woman in the dark that sort of make everything else seem unimportant."

In Vogel's play, despite the son's protesting, "You kissed him after all he's done," Charlene replies, "It's hard to explain…I have needs." Earlier, Vogel's' script touches upon what might motivate both Rihanna and Charlene in the male voice's statement, "She loved me for the danger."

But unlike Williams, Vogel further muddies the murky waters of female desire with her analogies to porn (as a cause of violence), and by her similar, yet very different portrayal of the abusive husband. In Streetcar, we learn very little about Stella's inner life (as opposed to that of Blanche), other than that she values status and knows that Stanley's the only one of his friends who will make anything of himself.

Blaming pornography

Vogel, by contrast, shows how Clyde's addiction to alcohol, pornography and prostitution have produced violent tendencies and a demeaning view of women. Charlene's acceptance, the play argues, stems from her own indulgences into the fantasy world of porn. The "female voice" in her head tells her to run out of the room, while the "male voice" eggs her on to stay. Williams, more the realist, would have switched these voices, so that the female in Charlene would drip with ecstasy at Clyde's displays of raw, masculine power.

Both Vogel and Williams acknowledge that some women enable their abusers, but Vogel would rather they didn't. Such women, she argues, are made and not born. Instead of asking herself why she stayed, Charlene puts the full blame on Clyde by demanding to know "how he could act that way."

Contrast this response to that of another another gay writer: the gender-realist UArts professor Camille Paglia, who wrote (in Vamps and Tramps), "Women are not in control of their bodies. Nature is." Paglia, like Tennessee Williams, makes you wonder: Are gays the only realists about heterosexual sex? On the other hand, Vogel—like all those who weighed in with disbelief when Rihanna forgave Chris Brown—just doesn't seem to get, or want to admit, the dangerous side of female desire.