Toying with cliches and sterotypes in new ways

JULIA TIERNAN/YH Troutman, Hirota, Steinhacker; Rah, Rah, Rah.

Vanities maps the familiar terrain of middle American youth coming of age in the days of the counter-culture. As the spawn of baby-boomers, it's our privilege to smirk at the clichés that this production puts on display, and at the same time, it's our burden to acknowledge how closely its concerns reflect our own tired adolescent waverings and what-are-you-doing-after -college-I-don't-know indulgences. The play risks being dismissed as a maudlin catalog of stereotypes in order to make a good point: that our impulse to reject the hackneyed story of innocence lost in the post-Kennedy world may expose our own adherence to stereotype. But our perceptiveness and ironic reserve as contemporary viewers are themselves clichés, products of a need for conformity just as callow and seductive as the social pressures that shape these characters.

The play follows three friends over a 10-year span. We first meet them on Nov. 22, 1963--their senior year--awash in the froth of high school cheerleaderdom. We next see them four years later in their college sorority, and then six years after that, when they reunite in a Manhattan apartment and evaluate their pasts. In each of the three acts, the demands and enticements of the larger world intrude upon their tiny sphere of friendship. With them come anxieties that are intentionally insipid and narcissistic: if I have sex with my boyfriend will he lose respect for me? Will my high school friends come with me to college? Who's this Viet Cong? The first act ends with an announcement over the high school PA system that the president has been shot. "The student council president has been shot? But I just saw him in homeroom," one girl exclaims as the lights dim.

With roles this vapid, the actors have the difficult job of keeping the play from becoming a parody, a cheap exploitation of the small-town cheerleader stereotype. They succeed, skillfully bringing nuances to their performances that retain the play's concern with conformity and clichés, without allowing the play itself to become clichéd.

The first act establishes the differences among the three that become more clear as the play progresses. The prissy Joanne (Annabelle Steinhacker, ES '00) complains that at the last football game the marching band spelled out "Yay Meat" instead of "Yay Team." Mary (Jessica Hirota, BK '00) replies with a mischievousness that stands as a bellwether of her later sexual adventures: "It makes sense to me, the whole team is good enough to eat." Between Mary's boldness and Joanne's hapless worries about decorum and popularity is the relative good-sense of Kathy (Erica Troutman, TC '00) who, despite her pragmatic nature, is the most uncertain of the three about her desires.

Under the direction of Andre-Philippe Mistier, MC '00, and Meredith Summerville, ES '01, the actors make skillful use of body language to underscore their characters' feelings for one another. In the first act they whirl around in a bubbling triad of giggles and nervous energy, smoothing each other's hair, patting limbs, and clutching hands. One of them will break from the group, bounce around with cheerleader pep, and then, as quickly as she left, rejoin the caresses, shrieking, and cooing of her friends. This giddy, unhesitating rapport gives way to a more restrained and delicate interaction within the sorority house of the second act. Here, the sharing of nail polish replaces the
hugging and hand-holding that we had
seen earlier.

In the third act, the characters sit nervously around a coffee table, their communicative gaps no longer filled by physical intimacy. When Mary coyly shrinks from Joanne's eager touch, it is as if her old friend's complacency and prudery were a skin disease.

The play's best moments come between acts, as the three women stand with their backs to the audience, preparing for the next scene, preening and changing clothes in front of lightbulb-ringed cosmetic mirrors that look like they belong backstage in the dressing room. These interludes serve as commentary on the personal changes that the characters undergo.

The play here equates the maturation and self-development of these three friends with the superficial transformations effected by a new shade of eye-shadow or a different style of skirt. At these times when the boundaries between actors and characters are obscured, Vanities seems to argue that the "real" identities and relationships it seeks to represent are little more than performances--mere contrived participations in clichéd roles.

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