2 out of 5 stars
Tampa Repertory Theatre’s TRT² at Silver Meteor Gallery, 2213 E. Sixth Ave., Ybor City, Tampa.
Through Nov. 29, Fri.-Sat. at 8 p.m.; Sun. at 3 p.m. $15. tamparep.org.
I wish I could say that I was enchanted by the word- and world-painting of Tender Napalm, Phillip Ridley’s exasperating confection currently showing at the Silver Meteor Gallery in a TRT² production. But as graphically inventive as Ridley’s dialogue is — and as talented as Betty-Jane Parks and Derrick Phillips are at speaking it — this is a game with no net, no way of telling who’s winning, who’s losing, or what’s at stake.
Imagine two lovers who can say anything to each other, compose any fantasy, verbalize any aggression. At first, the idea may seem liberating. But after a while, after he’s expressed everything from tender love to the will-to-mutilate, and she’s responded with lyrical grace and readiness-to-emasculate, you realize that there’s no start or stop to this rhapsody, that it can go on for hours without ever exhausting itself, that you the unwary spectator have wandered into someone’s private fantasia and there’s not even an intermission during which you can sneak out.
Can Ridley write? Yes, without doubt. Can these actors act? Yes, skillfully, superbly. But Tender Napalm lacks proportion, limits, deal-breakers. When anything can be said, nothing much is communicated. I’m glad Woman and Man are so profoundly in love, but get a hotel room. Not to be ungrateful, but there’s nothing here that we didn’t know.
The piece opens with the lovers making out with great intensity, then immediately becomes a long litany of imaginary actions that sometimes tend toward the lyrical, sometimes toward the murderous. He says he wants to put a bullet in her mouth, and she responds with the idea of scooping out his eyeballs with a spoon. She imagines they’ve been shipwrecked on a beach noisy with parrots and monkeys, he retorts that he’d like to shove a grenade up her vagina. He imagines a tsunami ruining their lovely seascape; she proposes tying him up, cutting off his penis and testicles, and then flushing them down the toilet.
All right, the spectator thinks, this is about the not-so-surprising proximity of sex and sado-masochism; how clever of Ridley to note it: now I wonder when something will happen. Tough luck: now she imagines they have a daughter, and he proposes that he’s riding a unicorn. She says she can breathe underwater, he tells how he was abducted by a UFO, spoken to telepathically by aliens, forced to provide his aggressive DNA so they can defend themselves against their enemies.
By now the innocent audience member realizes that nothing can stop these two except the limits of Ridley’s printer cartridge and the durability of his word processor. Is she a giant octopus now with tentacles sprouting in all directions? Ho-hum, yeah, she is. Are they dancing now, lovingly, as if all their aggression has been forgotten? Uh-huh, lovely dance, but what difference does it make, really? Might some of their imaginings actually point to real occurrences? Yes, something about his dying father, her party-going with a fat friend. But it doesn’t matter: the reveries slip seamlessly into one another and when it ends, we’re to understand that it’s all starting again, like the rut in a Moebius strip.
At least the actors get to show their chops. Parks is fine as Woman, showing us lust, malice, shock, lyricism, sangfroid, joy, and 20 other states of being, each one perfectly etched, each one as fleeting as the next. Phillips is terrific as Man, giving us anger, gentleness, bravado, amazement, horniness and 20 other dispositions, all adding up to everything/nothing.
All this is played on a stage bare except for a mattress on the floor, some tall paper boxes, and some box-like objects covered with a canvas. Woman is dressed in a blue shirt over her bra and panties; Man wears a plaid shirt over his white undershorts. Dan Granke’s direction is kinetically relentless; if there’s a through-line in this perpetual motion machine, he hasn’t found it (and maybe it’s not there). One thing he does make us see, though: these two are crazy about each other. No grenade, placed in any orifice, will ever temper their passion.
Bottom line: true love is unmannerly. It doesn’t include for third parties, even when said parties have purchased a ticket.
Tender Napalm: The title says it all. Everything else is repetition.
This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2015.