Don't step to this hiveÑyou might get stung

Sweetness always sours in A Taste of Honey, where the only taste anyone enjoys is that of whiskey. To understand the subtleties of this play, directed by Anna Moore, MC '01, one must merely follow the advice of one of her characters: "Don't pull, don't get excited, and don't get impatient." In fact, it is only the cast that ignores this adage, playing off each other in such a pleasing way that the audience's interest is automatic.

KATHERINE ALDRICH/YH Where's my honey? My honey don't taste so sweet. How much it do taste sticky. Isn't that right, mamma?

At each unpredictable turn in the plot, and even as the characters' actions make them more elusive, we seek in their complex personalities some unification of the delicately arranged opening scene. A mother and her daughter stumble down the steep staircase of Nick Chapel, banging suitcases on the floor of their new one-room tenement that looks out onto a slaughterhouse. This story of marriage, birth, and child-parent relationships manages to offer few redeeming notions about life. Death, on the other hand, is spoken of with barely a sentimental slant; rooms are preferred dark and the shelter of a coffin is almost inviting.

A series of unwarranted fights and love affairs causes the 18-year-old Jo (Marie Filotti, TC '01) to lose her virginity to the prototypically suave-yet-temporary sailor Jimmy (Vik Swamy, PC '03). It's Christ-mastime and Mom has up and married a one-eyed tycoon (Bradley Bazzle, CC '02) 10 years her junior. Bazzle portrays Peter with greater dimension than his minor character deserves, but his humor provides some relief from the plot. His diatribes against Jo and Helen resonate with a bitterness more believable than that of the other actors, who tend to vacillate reluctantly between ferocity and weakness.

Jo gets pregnant, just as her mother did at around the same age, and supports herself with two jobs until Geof (Noah Kaye, CC '02), who's conveniently just been evicted by his landlord for his "sexual deviance," moves in to help. Although Geof assumes the stereotypical mannerisms of a homosexual—he incessantly sweeps the floor, prances about, and provides demanded hugs—he is presented as the most stable and stabilizing figure in the play. Just as Geof's balance is too unaware of the dysfunctional story, at times Kaye's acting ignores the complexity of his relationship with Jo. Kaye redeems amicability, however, through his character's taming of the self-proclaimed spoiled and solipsistic Jo. His fond indulgence of her incurs her affection, and their relationship ultimately develops into a sexless marriage of sorts.

This unfettered love is precisely what Jo needs: after growing up under what she sees as a controlling, whorish, and unloving mother who used to "pull her hand away" from her daughter's to reach for the nearest man or sip of whiskey, Jo can appreciate the reliability of her new, albeit male, mother figure. Jo's care for Geof comes at just the right time, when the paradox of her drama and apathy (conflated in near perfect pitch by the actress) threatens to collapse into a repetitive whine.

Written by British playwright Shelagh Delaney in 1959 when she was 17, A Taste of Honey addresses deeper issues than the expected ones of adolescence and sexual discovery. To begin with, the play projects these so-called stages of life onto all the actors, from Jo's gay companion to Helen's (Katie Vagnino, BR '03) alcoholic husband. Madness provides every scene with new ways of looking at life's objects. A nightgown resembles a shroud, a pot of bulbs buried in soil and forgotten under a couch symbolizes a cemetery, and a headache repeatedly mentioned—"my head's splitting in two"—hints at Helen's multiple personality disorder. Her persistent cold suggests a general malaise looming over the entire play, one that Jo adopts when she catches the cold, even though Helen has told her, "It's your own life, ruin it your own way." Presumably Jo's child will also contract the metaphorical cold. Geof brings Jo a handkerchief and tells her to blow, showing his perceptive care; no one ever tells this to Helen, who spends so much of the first act wiping her nose that one begins to wonder if she suffers from a cocaine addiction as well as alcoholism. The actress' franticness in these first scenes exhausts the audience fortunately just before it exhausts Vagnino, who changes from her skintight outfit into a low-key dress that dictates her calmer attitude throughout the rest of the play.

In response to her mother's dulling of life through whiskey and sex, Jo refuses any obvious forms of world-opiates, including the milk that offers a pretense of soothing. She doesn't even allow Geof to clean; whenever he picks up children's books, she throws them onto the floor. If she can't have love or even normality, at least she will try for truth. So she admits, "I'm feeling nothing," a statement mitigated only by the illusions of companionship portrayed by her shouting match with Geof aimed at describing themselves. "Unique! unrivaled! smashing!" they yell, until the nonsense of their noise mixes inextricably with the screaming fights that have characterized all interactions up to this point.

Scenes are short and flow into each other, masking the substantial length of the performance—just under three hours. Couples decide to marry in a minute, people move in and out of the apartment like the cockroaches Peter describes as "playing leap frog," and, all along, glasses of milk and bare light bulbs effect the existential arguments that drive the play.

Incongruities only arise in the carefree attitude of the jazz soundtrack that lets the audience relax between scenes, and the actors' charm, which inevitably shines through their attempted bad humors. This inconsistency reveals itself in uncontrollable (though endearing) laughs from the actors at times of utter commotion. It is in these moments of mayhem—where humor, emptiness, and misunderstanding join in a triptych of real life emotion—that sourness becomes appetizing and madness becomes art.

Back to A&E...