Cliche Humor at Home in Skirt

It's hard to appreciate the familiar comfort of curtains, sets, and backdrops until a play like this comes along, with solid black walls, a mattress, an aluminum ladder, and some loud rock music. A young woman comes out, sits on the bed, and says: "My boyfriend is experiencing reverse evolution." She means it literally.

It is a fitting way to begin The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, premiering at the Walkerspace in the Village by the Ateh Theater Group. It is an emotional hour and a half of participation in the funny, sad, and disturbing lives of characters too real for backdrops. The play frequently deals in uncertainties and moral grey areas, but one feels that the characters are charming with their strange mix of otherworldliness and earthiness.

Between sets, the actors would scrawl and scratch frantically on the bare walls in chalk-things like squiggles, pictures, and "OUCH!" High-energy guitar music helps to mark the space between these self-contained scenes grounded in silly plots about impossible characters. There are some resemblances to the movie American Beauty, particularly in the contrast between normalcy and eccentricity, and in the brilliant way it all fits together.

Each actor, in a straight-faced style, exaggerates ordinary character flaws into fantastic characters. One scene starts in a high school science class, where the mermaid (Sara Montgomery) answers all of the marine biology questions correctly, while the imp (Elizabeth Neptune) sits in the back, drinking beer out of a Coke can and cracking lousy jokes.

Another scene follows the love affair of a girl (Alexis Grausz) with a cripple fetish and her step-uncle (Cormac Bluestone), who has a hunch-back implant.

All of the actors are as honest and intense as the material, but Kathryn Ekblad (who plays a mutant) stands out; she is emotional but never overacts. Montgomery is another standout, faking a stereotypical, loud orgasm with the best of them. Each actor plays many different roles, and some are particularly good at distinguishing between them, such as Grausz, who played the girl with the cripple fetish and the "ice girl."

The actors, none of them older than 30, run into trouble trying to play the older characters. The vignettes are largely about youth, though, so the lapses are hardly noticeable.

Also interesting are the choices made by the director, Bridgette Dunlap. The chalk-writing, repetition of words from previous scenes, and the bareness of the stage all lend the evening a strange feel. The quietness adds to the uncanniness. This makes the rare scream and the Rock 'n' Roll scene-change music that much more compelling. Dunlap's use of the black stage is nuanced and interesting: characters sit on the floor, on the mattress, and on chairs, stand, and sit on the back partition. The small space is used very effectively.

The play combines a lot of elements-fantasy, loud music, roller-coaster emotional arcs-that individually would not interest everyone, or might even seem cliche. In this setting, however, they work unexpectedly well. One might say that this is the space where cliches-imps, mermaids, tortured artists, mutants, the search for the self, the search for the father, the search for that special someone-go to live.