Here it is the day after Kathy Ng’s World Premiere of Beautiful Princess Disorder at Catastrophic Theatre and the vertigo from the mood swings is still hanging around. Beautiful Princess Disorder might not be in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but maybe it should be. Or maybe you will just know it when you see it after this will-never-get-out-of-your-head production.
First of all, get used to “heaven” having the required fluffy and puffy cloud coverage, but also a 1971 dilapidated once super deluxe station wagon sitting in the parking lot where entrants to heaven await being processed. “God is procrastinating His judgment.”
And who is waiting in this parking lot? Triangle Person (A mind-blowingly funny but also serious as a heart attack actress T Lavois Thiebaud), Mother Theresa (Amy Bruce, proving that only the best actresses can pull off showing the Most Famous Nun in the World at her worst), and infamous killer whale Tilikum, also known as Tilly (a vivacious Kyle Sturdivant, who is so meow-meow funny one minute, and then the next is answering interrogation questions to get into heaven that will punch you in the gut). This is quite the trio of actors, and they make the avante-garde-ing that Catastrophic is known for look easy—but of course it’s not, and that kind of risky business never is.
Triangle Person DEMANDS that she is a beautiful princess, and Disney is one of her many homes. But she’s not in Disney Land, she is in the Heaven Can Wait Parking lot, breaking the 4th Wall with a sledgehammer, demanding the audience coach her as a competitive swimmer for external success and saccharine photos of a fabulous elite-swimmer-coach relationship. It’s the kind of pie-in-the-sky delusion on demand that Triangle Person welcome us to, literally: “Welcome to the Sky.” And what is the sky? No borders, and one anticlimax after another. This surreal psychological and physical landscape is bonkers: a killer whale has a better chance than Mother Theresa of getting into heaven! But is that really so different than anything else in the world? Hmmm.
Did I mention that Triangle Person has a big yellow triangle for a head while in a “no-nonsense” swimsuit ready for intense competition and external validation sown through obsessive hard work to model after the loved/hated freak of nature Michael Phelps? You might be thinking the yellow triangle is an ironic yield sign for the Beautiful Princess Disorder in which there is no filter and no yielding, because that would get in the way of some serious Bi-Polar or Borderline Personality Disorderly conduct. Or you might just think “Constant Triangulation to up the drama quotient, as in on stage, right now?” Don’t stress too much about it—you are going to try to allegorize, but better just to float on the water of the show and hope that you are not in a pool near Tilly.
Expertly directed by Founding Artistic Director Jason Nodler, this production had extensive consultations and deep revisions with the playwright, Kathy Ng, who was present for an illuminating talk-back after Sunday’s performance. In the play, Ng appears in a filmed backdrop of her discussing herself in a way that illuminates the autobiographical elements in the play.
Maybe this is Theatre of the Absurd, but who cares what you call it? The world is a little too much with us, reality showing through too much for the dodge of that label. Mother Theresa is a hot mess of insecurity and not-enough-ness paired with cruelty and a big empathy deficit. You might think she was the best nun in the world, but Christopher Hitchens’ book expose of her, The Missionary Position, is tossed around and there’s no unringing that bell. Your formerly favorite nun is a sketchy fraud who says she is pro-life, but she won’t even entertain Triangle Person’s pleas for her to care about all the “Thought Babies” that are killed. If a nun won’t care about your aborted dreams, who will?
In Ng’s liminal waiting room, God is right next door to heaven, but he never visits. He wants people to do Netflix specials that are more to his liking. But what has replaced God in this play? Well, the internet and podcasts—they provide the answers to everything, right? One of the best scenes is when Triangle Person tries to reach the pinnacle of her head mentioning all sorts of triangles of improvement that we have shoved into our own triangle heads, like that ridiculous food pyramid and even Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which is such a struggle, impossible really, to reach.
Matt Fries’ set design, the spot-on costumes by Macy Lyne, the pendulum of soft and harsh lighting by Roma Flowers, and the music, video and sound design by James Templeton all dovetail to create a theatrical experience that keeps you engaged and in a state of constant interpretive schizophrenia, but in a good way.
Triangle Person is a Beautiful Princess but has “never been treated like one.” Maybe she is a petulant brat, maybe she has one of the types of bipolar disorder, or maybe it is a just a big case of “Welcome to the Sky,” where there are no borders, but plenty of room for borderline personality disorder. But who doesn’t have THAT in this play, where a killer whale is shamed for killing, even though he “loves” his victims? They just trigger major splitting as they fail to give the external validation that keeps the performing animal doing their bidding. You wouldn’t think that Sturdivant’s interrogation answers in a full Orca costume would move you so much, but they do. Plus, the bonus that this play probably dramatizes BPD better than any college course or podcast ever will.
Trigger warnings: there is lots of sexual innuendo, hilarious physical demands on the actors, obsessions with sushi and Californication, compulsory blasphemy, accusations against the audience by Triangle Person that make you feel like maybe you are guilty. But mainly the trigger warning is for the revelation that it is a Never Enough World—two medical miracles won’t get you into heaven, you need to look down and eat dirt all the time, you have to swim and swim and swim and never stop unless you think you are about to have a heart attack. You might not know that from the internet and all.
It’s The Catastrophic Theatre being The Catastrophic Theatre, just like a killer whale has to be a killer whale. You know: that animal we take our kids to see in case they might want to be a marine biologist.
Beautiful Princess Disorder continues through December 13 at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2:30 p.m. Sundays at the Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston (MATCH), 3400 Main. Special Monday Night performance on December 1 at 7:30pm. This production is recommended for audiences 12 and older, but this reviewer recommends older. For more information, call 713-521-4533 or visit matchouston.org. Pay What You Can.
The post <i>Beautiful Princess Disorder</i> Will Knock Your Tiara Off appeared first on Houston Press.
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