Also this issue:

Music Man
James Sugg finds songwriting method amid madness.
-Juliet Fletcher

Coming Out of the Dark
A move into white for Thomas Chimes and vibrant work from Stuart Netsky light up Locks Gallery.
-Robin Rice

Preston Foerder
-Debra Auspitz

Curtis Opera Theatre's French Comic One Acts
-David Shengold

River North Chicago Dance Company
-Janet Anderson

Funky Junk Auction/Bike Parts Art Raid
-Debra Auspitz

City of Angels
-David Anthony Fox

Fiction
-Toby Zinman

April 10-16, 2003

theater

Scab

by David Anthony Fox

It had to happen sometime. For three and a half seasons, I have remained your dutiful City Paper theater critic, sitting attentively through more than 200 productions till final curtain.

It took Eternal Spiral Project's production of Scab to drive me out at intermission.

Scab is meant to be a profound, symbolic and hilarious examination of womanhood through a feminist lens. It is (or at least the first act is) a witless gal-pal comedy with unbearable pretensions.

Christa, a perky graduate student, has just arrived at UCLA to study French bourgeois women of the fin-de-siecle. She's worried she won't fit in with her brainiac fellow students. She also has to cope with a problem roommate -- Anima -- who is prone to asthmatic fits and lying on the floor. (We can't be too hard on Anima, though. She's just lost her father, and her remaining family enjoys the company of a Virgin Mary lawn statue at their dinner table.)

For much of the first act, Christa and Anima do Girl Things. They gab about what dresses to wear. They buy a houseplant, name it "Susan" and treat it like their daughter.

Maybe they should be a couple. Really, C and A seem eerily complementary.

Hold the phone! Maybe these two are actually opposite sides of the same woman! Perhaps the crude, Jack Daniel's-guzzling Anima ("Anima" -- get it?) is Christa's Inner John Belushi! That would make sense (if anything could) of Christa's graduate school fascination with those French bohemian women who (I'm paraphrasing here) "needed to remain orderly while at the same time wanting to run naked through the streets."

If the above isn't enough to convince you I was right to flee when I did, consider that Scab is also virulently anti-intellectual. Sheila Callaghan, the author, enjoys skewering what she imagines is academic discourse. Her smugness is misplaced, since Callaghan gets the tone completely wrong.

Director Deborah Block provides no cohering vision on the stage, but does offer a program note that quotes a Ntozake Shange poem (something involving a "lunar vulva"). Among the cast, Jessica Graham (Christa) and Amanda Schoonover (Anima) both have quirky charm that is wasted here. It's all especially dispiriting, since in the past Eternal Spiral Project has done some fine work.

As for playwright Callaghan, who is ultimately responsible for this gaseous mess, I recommend a barium Anima.

Through April 20, Eternal Spiral Project at 2nd Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-563-4330.