I’ve by no means been good with horror, even in its campier kinds. I caught a single clip from The Silence of the Lambs many years in the past and have by no means dared to observe the entire film. In sixth grade, Sweeney Todd saved me awake for weeks. And a [cough] completely cheap variety of years in the past, I made it 40 minutes right into a film known as Tooth earlier than I needed to … extract myself. So, though my big-girl ego instructed me I’d be superb, it was nonetheless with some trepidation in my id that I took my seat for the brand new musical written by Anna Ok. Jacobs (guide and music) and Michael R. Jackson (guide and lyrics) based mostly on that 2007 movie I had by no means been in a position to end. Then, the home lights smashed to black, the stage-wide banner emblazoned with the present’s identify — splashed ominously with blood — fluttered to the bottom, and it took all of 30 seconds to transform my nerves to pleasure. Underneath Sarah Benson’s claws-out route, Tooth feels just like the musical equal of driving a spike-covered Mad Max automotive throughout the desert whereas getting chased by warfare boys on their approach to Valhalla. It’s a rush — and it’s additionally a pitch-dark examination of the very actual chokehold of Christofascist ideology in America.
The horror of Tooth features on two ranges: There are the grotesque occasions — that are enjoyably scary as a result of they’re fantastical — after which there are the concepts, that are infinitely scarier as a result of they’re something however. We’re in New Testomony Village, a Christian group implicitly positioned someplace in center America, and our heroine, Daybreak O’Keefe (the exceptional Alyse Alan Louis), is shaken, as a result of on her watch, as chief of the “Promise Keeper Ladies,” one in all their quantity has “let the Enemy corrupt her thoughts.” Because the rabidly charismatic chief of Daybreak’s congregation, identified solely as Pastor, Steven Pasquale couldn’t be higher — square-jawed, wild-eyed, and gloriously unafraid of scenery-chomping, he’s in his component as he hollers right into a handheld mic, “WOMAN? WHERE IS YOUR FIG LEAF? WOMAN? WHERE IS YOUR SHAME?!?” Daybreak’s cohort, the “PKGs,” are a bunch of high-school ladies who’ve all, in Pastor’s phrases, dedicated themselves to the “particularly superior message of feminine empowerment by means of sexual purity.” They put on the rings and stroll the stroll, and now they’re all on hearth with divine judgment geared toward their former sister, the damningly absent Amy Sue Pearson. Why? “As a result of,” shouts Promise Keeper Woman Trisha (the fantastic Jenna Rose Husli), “Amy Sue bought herself pregnant!” It’s completely phrased. Later we’re instructed that Mary “bought herself pregnant by Father God.”
As Pastor rained down hellfire and the PKGs quivered in fearful ecstasy — whereas the boys within the congregation sat to consideration in numerous states of torment — snort after snort poured out of my matinee viewers. From me, too — Jacobs and Jackson’s guide is instantly and persistently humorous. Later, Daybreak and her pious stud of a boyfriend, Tobey (Jason Gotay), share a duet known as “Modest Is Hottest” that’s as glorious a bit of comedian songwriting as I’ve heard in lots of a menstrual cycle. Nonetheless, I couldn’t assist questioning whether or not the extremity of our glee arose from a New York crowd’s sense of ironic distance. It’s not an inappropriate response and it is perhaps an unavoidable one, however right here’s the factor: Tooth isn’t actually a satire. Earlier than its extra nightmarish units emerge, it’s, terrifyingly, realism with banging songs.
Whereas Daybreak and the PKGs launched into “Valuable Present,” a rapturous anthem in regards to the all-important job of preserving virginity, I discovered myself remembering one other present on this exact same stage at Playwrights Horizons. Will Arbery’s shadowy and excellent Heroes of the Fourth Turning won’t at first look appear to share a lot with a bloody, bawdy musical, however Tooth is its non secular sibling. Each performs are voyages into a very American darkness, and so they come from locations of painful private understanding. Jackson — whose Pulitzer-winning A Unusual Loop additionally digs deep into disgrace — writes about his personal Baptist upbringing within the present’s program and has spoken about understanding “what it’s prefer to be afraid of your individual physique and to really feel like … you’re going to hell.” The actual pulse and energy of Tooth is that, at the same time as its blushing bloom ripens right into a monstrous fruit, it retains maintain of its driving supertask. It’s actually a present not about vagina dentata however in regards to the cancerous cycles of self-loathing, misogyny, and violence that fester on the coronary heart of purity tradition.
Effectively, it’s additionally about vagina dentata. Daybreak is headed for a traumatic discovery of what lurks in her woman components. Regardless of their holiest efforts, she and Tobey — and, actually, all the youngsters in Pastor’s thrall — are sexy as hell. Daybreak’s need frightens and disgusts her (you don’t need to have been raised Evangelical to undergo alongside throughout her wrenching track of self-castigation, “The Disgrace in My Physique”), whereas, for her step-brother, Brad (Will Connolly, fantastic at being terrible), need and disgrace have lengthy since putrefied into hatred. Brad is Pastor’s son, Daybreak his stepdaughter, and each mothers are out of the image — Brad’s fled, Daybreak’s died. “He’s jealous,” Pastor tells Daybreak, “’Trigger regardless that you’re not my organic little one and he’s, the 2 of us couldn’t be extra bonded by the blood of the lamb.” Whereas Daybreak and Tobey wrestle in opposition to their raging hormones, Brad descends into the darkish net. Behind a VR masks, he finds his personal non secular chief, a males’s life coach known as Godfather (voiced by Pasquale) who blames “male ache” on “the feminocracy” and dubs his premium subscribers “Truthseekers.” Once more, is it satire if, with a number of clicks, it might all be proved nauseatingly true-to-life?
Brad’s male ache is particular, and particularly linked to Daybreak: He’s lacking the primary joint of a finger as a result of, after they had been youngsters — he sings, face white, eyes blazing — “She bit me / It bit me.” Solely Brad suspects what Daybreak will quickly be taught, when she and Tobey lastly succumb to their eager for one another one night time in a lake. Crucially, Tobey has proposed, and Daybreak loves him. She feels protected till he stops listening to her, till he’s hurting her, and one thing inside her bites again. Now the props designer, Matt Carlin, actually will get to begin having enjoyable. From right here on out, in the event you don’t need to see a bunch of bloody severed phalli, shut your eyes. As a result of as soon as Daybreak’s second set of enamel have taken their first chomp, the present named for them jumps into allegorical revenge mode.
At first, it’s a gory blast: Actual flames burst from Adam Rigg’s seemingly easy set, which seems to include an entire basket of Easter eggs; Pasquale will get to do yet one more wild flip as an oleaginous gynecologist whose smarmy showstopper (“Ladies Like You”) appears like a hat-tip to Little Store’s dastardly dentist whereas additionally reaching its personal magnificent ranges of cringe; the congregation’s closeted homosexual boy, Daybreak’s buddy Ryan (I noticed Sean Doherty stepping in for Jared Loftin and knocking it out of the park), will get a deliciously nasty betrayal arc; and the PKGs — each one in all them a powerhouse — step majestically into their ever-expanding function as Greek refrain, shape-shifting from leather-clad devils to mourning widows to ravening Bacchae.
There’s, nonetheless, a however coming. The grander Tooth’s Guignol will get, the extra diffuse it feels. Escalation is a tough enterprise — it’s why SNL sketches are not often fully profitable; the writers know the way to construct however not the way to end. Tooth — which is so good in so some ways — at present suffers from the identical downside. As Daybreak goes from afraid of her personal physique to righteous wielder of its vulvic weaponry, the story of an actual younger lady’s empowerment, and her deep struggling, is obscured beneath a splatter of apocalyptica. Individually burrowing into darkish Wikipedia, each Ryan and Brad come throughout an entry on an historical goddess known as Dentata. “She’s on the coronary heart of males’s emasculation fears,” sings Ryan, to which Brad provides, whipping his on-line Truthseeker buddies right into a frenzy, “Quickly she’ll construct herself a military and one after the other / They’ll kill.” I don’t need to spoil the small print of Tooth’s finale, however you’ll be able to in all probability guess that it’s a Guide of Revelations–type affair, ballooning into grisliness and mass destruction like Tetsuo on the finish of Akira. In the end, in a gesture that feels a bit of too drained to be worthy of the higher a part of Jacobs and Jackson’s writing, the goddess turns her voracious, cruel gaze out upon the viewers. We’re — oh, phrase that’s by no means fairly as efficient as we would like it to be — implicated.
It’s too unhealthy, as a result of we’re additionally, within the present’s last moments, extra distanced from the true anguish at its coronary heart than we’ve been all alongside. What about Daybreak? What occurs to women who’re raised to detest themselves, who blame themselves for the autumn of man, who blame themselves after they’re raped? What occurs — not simply within the heightened horror-scape however on the planet we’ve all bought to stay in on daily basis — when a lot internalized violence gushes out? “The moon turns pink and the strains all blur,” sings Daybreak, “and inside my head I’m reborn as her.” That inside my head is essential, but it surely’s not how Jacobs, Jackson, and Benson play it. By blowing the highest off of Tooth — by driving as exhausting as they do into literal Armageddon — the present’s creators get to wreak some enjoyable theatrical havoc, however in addition they wind up sacrificing a great portion of their story’s humanity. And there’s an extra feeling of troubling fuzziness within the bloody rout: Masculine and female violence aren’t precisely being equated, however they’re not being as exactly distinguished in kind and trigger. Whereas it’s tempting to go huge and brazen, Tooth loses one thing because it bursts its seams. However what it’s bought remains to be, in so many moments, lava-hot and canines-sharp. Beneath the fireplace and blood, the legendary battles and severed dicks — contained in the promise ring and a budget paneled partitions of the church rec room — is the actual horror present.
Tooth is at Playwrights Horizons by means of April 14.
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