Deviant

a highly subjective review

Before I share my thoughts about ‘Deviant’, I have a confession to make: I had some serious second (and third and fourth and fifth) thoughts about this play. Even after I’d bought my tickets and made the plane and hotel reservations, I was wondering how I would react to it. I’m not in my twenties any more - hell, I’m not even in my thirties. While I consider myself the most liberal and open-minded forty-something woman I know, a play about bizarre sexual fetishes didn’t exactly seem like an evening of light entertainment. It sounded shocking, and I hope I’ve retained the ability to be shocked. Certainly, not as easily as I could have been shocked twenty-five years ago but, if a person loses his or her capacity to be shocked, they risk becoming so jaded that nothing excites them any more. I still enjoy being excited.

In the end, the determining factor was Randy Harrison. I’ve often said I’d pay to see him stand on a bare stage and read the telephone book. Granted, ‘Deviant’ was a far cry from the Yellow Pages. By the time I strolled into the Kraine Theater on Friday night, August 23^rd, I’d read several reviews and gotten emails from a couple of friends who’d seen it. I was calm. I was collected. I was ready for anything they threw at me.

Or so I thought.

Yes, ‘Deviant’ disturbed me, but not in totally bad way.

I can almost see your questioning looks. How, you ask, can a disturbance be anything but a negative experience?

According to dictionary.com, to disturb is to ‘move deeply’. The connotation is neither positive nor negative. Another definition of disturb is ‘to break up or destroy the tranquillity or settled state of’. What is more settled in most of us than our sexual identity? The way we perceive ourselves and our partners affects how we deal with everyone else. While we may discover new things that turn us on and, at the same time, we realise that some of the old tried-and-true things don’t do it for us any more, our basic perception of what is and isn’t sexy changes little.

‘Deviant’ challenged many of the things I’d thought were un-challenge-able: what is (and isn’t) sexy and why something turns one person on and another person off.

As we enter the theater, most of the cast is already onstage. Everyone, with the exception of one female, is paired up, participating in various manifestations of bdsm behaviour. It’s all pretty vanilla, as sexual perversion goes. A young man enters and everyone immediately recognises him as a ‘real’ perv. Which he is. Is it paranoia when everyone really *is* looking at you? Ariel Brooke does a good job as the de facto narrator, relating the ground rules to Marshall (Randy Harrison).

Marshall has little time for conversation. He’s here to find a partner, but not just anyone. He’s looking for a woman with a ‘dead-eye look’. Someone who is ‘almost gone’. He approaches a girl who’s enjoying a special moment with a carrot; we only ever know her as ‘Carrotfucker’. Marshall sees, in her, the qualities he needs and offers her money to come home with him. She won’t have to fuck him, he assures her. He’s never fucked a human, he later tells her. She agrees and they leave together.

For those of you who have only ever seen Randy as Justin Taylor on Queer as Folk, this was a departure for him. There was no Justin in Marshall, not even a little bit. Marshall was judgmental, while eschewing the right of others to judge him. His statement to Carrotfucker: ‘Don’t look at me like *I’m* the strange one,’ is Marshall in nutshell. He was controlling and overbearing and, at the same time, pathetic and very sad. He’d suicide-proofed his apartment, getting rid of Drano, extension cords, long tube socks and he retained bars on his windows, despite living on the second floor. Even though it was never said, I got the idea that he was a solitary soul; his most loyal companion was the ‘Fucking Guilt’ that he carried with him at all times. He was driven, by his obsession, to participate in an activity that he knew to be wrong, but was unable to stop himself from doing.

The main complaint I have about ‘Deviant’ is that we never got to truly understand where Marshall’s fascination with crushing came from. He recreated an idyllic scene, supposedly from his childhood, in which he watched his parents having sex on a carpet of bugs, and then he said it never happened. We were treated to the complete backstory of how the Carrotfucker came to be capable of copulating only with carrots. Not dildos or cucumbers - just carrots. It was a sad story of trying to de-flower herself so she could have sex with the most popular boy in school, Steve Patrey, played cockily by Jason Lopez. Marshall’s formative years are never dealt with and I think the story suffers because of it.

Another interesting thing I noticed was in the ‘wrestling match’ between Fucking Guilt and Lust. It occurs in the context of Marshall’s fantasy life. When he masturbates, Marshall confesses that he pictures his head on the body of a bug. He looks up to see a large high heel shoe descending toward him, intent to quashing him like a… well, like the bug that he imagines himself to be. He doesn’t know the identity of the woman attached to the shoe and he doesn’t care. All he cares about is that the shoe presses down on him, pushing his intestines up and out his throat and down and out his ass. He is a second away from orgasm when he’s overcome by…

Fucking Guilt.

In the midst of this serious scene about how it feels to be trampled, the match between Fucking Guilt and Lust is a silly and much-needed comedic change-of-pace. As I watched this scene, I wondered if it was a coincidence that Fucking Guilt was played by a female and Lust was played by a male. I might call it misogynistic if the playwright was a man, but it was written by a woman. Still, it was curious.

By the way, the wrestling match was a draw. It was very well choreographed by Jim Cairl, who played several parts, including Louie the Loser, Marshall’s dad and the guy who called the phone sex line and wanted to talk about cars.

Marshall listens, politely, as the Carrotfucker relates her life’s story but we get the idea that he only pretends to be interested. She’s there to do what he’s already paid her to do. He starts off slowly, with a worm. Unless, he says, she has a special place in her heart for worms. If so, they can start with something else. Despite being disgusted, she agrees to trample the worm. Marshall hands her a pair of red high heel shoes. Her observation that the heels are covered by guts and blood isn’t even acknowledged as Marshall gets everything ready. He loving touches the shoes, then her feet, before helping her put them on.

He doesn’t want her to kill the worm immediately. He gets excited as he watches her playing with it with the heel of her shoe. At his command, she stomps the worm repeatedly, while he watches, enthralled. She’s camping it up, showing him some skin as she performs her task. He looks at her in disgust. ‘I’m not interested in your face,’ he tells her. She says she’s just trying to make it good for herself. At the mention that she’s having fun, Marshall is emboldened. He pulls more money out of his pocket and drops it on the floor. He then reaches into a cage and pulls out a guinea pig.

I think this is the minute that the tone of the play changes from kinky to dangerous. The girl is obviously disgusted by what Marshall wants her to do. She tries to tell him, but he’s not listening. He’s given her more money and he honestly doesn’t think there’s any difference between trampling a worm or a guinea pig. She tries to leave, but he stops her. Realising the change in his demeanour, she agrees. He turns away to get things ready and she makes a break for the door. This has obviously happened to him before, and he’s ready for it. He grabs her. She struggles. He slaps her, hard, knocking her to the floor, unconscious.

Marshall wants - needs - someone to help him complete what he’s started. If he can’t get the girl to co-operate, he’ll call someone who will, for $2.99 a minute. He tells the phone sex operator that the girl won’t fulfill her end of the bargain. She wants to talk to the girl but she’s unconscious. It’s obvious that, because Marshall can’t get her to talk on the phone, the operator doesn’t believe there *is* a girl there. Maybe she thinks Marshall has one of those blow-up dolls. She tells Marshall to show his ‘girl’ how it feels to be trampled, and he does. In the very brief final scene between Marshall and the Carrotfucker, he seems to have lost the last vestige of humanity that he’s been clinging to.

That scene was very difficult to watch, even after I’d seen it once or twice. I won’t describe, in great detail, how Marshall kills the girl, but that’s what happens. If you want the whole scene described, email me and I’ll tell you. There are two more phone sex monologues after that scene, in which Marshall sits quietly by the body of the Carrotfucker, trying to deal with what he’d just done.

Everyone in the cast is wonderful and it’s obvious that they’re having a great time. Before Friday night’s performance, I met the mother of one of the cast members. Barbara’s daughter, Emily Parker, played Fucking Guilt, Marshall’s mom, Kelly Stirrup and the phone sex operator who talked about cars, and she was very good. Sara Trachtenberg (who played Stephanie Prushinski and the phone sex girl who talked about the puppy), Melanie Warner (who played the phone sex operator whose foot had been cut off) and Fred Urfer (who played Lust and the phone sex guys who talked about wounds and the puppy) were all marvelous. They played several roles, sometimes changing from one character to another on the stage. Another favourite of mine was Rob DeRosa, who played the Satanfucker. That character was crazy and funny and totally off-the-wall, certainly one of the comedic highlights of the play.

The anonymous female lead, known only to us as the Carrotfucker was played, amazingly, by Marci Adilman. Her portrayal of a woman who had taken a long and unhappy road to where she was in life was, at the same time, fascinating and sad. If she hated humans, as she said, why was she in a fetish club, surrounded by lots of sweating humans? She also said she hated herself, and that she was afraid she’d accidentally kill herself and everyone would think she did it on purpose. She certainly didn’t seem to care that she was engaging in very risky behaviour - leaving a sex club with a man you don’t know, but who paid you $200 to go home with him isn’t rational behaviour. Still, Randy and Marci worked very well together. They went to high school together in Atlanta and they acted together before he went to CCM and she went to NYU. I’d love to see them together again on stage.

But the #1 attraction of the play, for me, was the reason I traveled 1400 miles to search for a tiny theater in the East Village of NYC on a hot August weekend: Randy Harrison. This is the second play I’ve seen him in and he just keeps getting better and better. I’ve heard a few criticisms of the play, and his portrayal of Marshall. First of all, I couldn’t disagree more that he did little beyond reciting his lines. His performance was understated and touching and heartbreaking. He played a man who was a prisoner of his sexual obsession; for him, there was no way out of his self-imposed prison. The fanfic writer in me wants to know what happens to Marshall next - will he be arrested for murder? Will he be judged insane? Will he spend the rest of his life in an asylum? The fact that I even care what happens to Marshall is due to the amazing job Randy did of bringing the character to life.

The one-act play is very short - only about an hour long - but there’s a great deal to keep your eyes glued to the stage. There’s also a great deal to make you think about long after the play is over. I’m sure different people got different things out of it. There were those who were simply disgusted by Randy’s character and what he did. Then there were others, like me, who saw a deeper meaning. As a matter of fact, I’m still trying to understand what *I* took away from it. Maybe the most important thing I got was the folly of judging people. We have no idea what someone has endured during his or her lifetime and it’s not fair to expect them to conform to our idea of what’s right and what’s wrong. It ‘disturbed’ my rather complacent view of what’s acceptable sexual behaviour, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Everyone needs to be shaken up a little every once in a while.