NEW YORK, NY.- On an imaginary island off the coast of some enemy state that exists only in fantasy, a navy is becalmed. A blackout is to blame, but its the good kind of blackout the kind that stops a war in its tracks.
Still, it means the phones arent working. So when Pvt. Willy Memnons mother calls him up from elsewhere on the base camp, she does it the analog way: on a paper cup attached to a string.
William Iphigenio Memnon, she says, using his full name because she means business, pick up the cup, I need to ask you something.
Unusual middle name, no? Then again, his father is Gen. Aga Memnon, and his mother is Memnon, aka Clytemnestra. And in Hansol Jungs delightfully loopy sex comedy, Merry Me, it matters not a whit that navies dont tend to have generals and privates, or that the Clytemnestra we know from ancient Greek drama, mother to the sacrificed Iphigenia, stays at home when her Agamemnon goes off to the Trojan War.
In Merry Me, directed by Leigh Silverman at New York Theater Workshop, Clytemnestra (Cindy Cheung) tags along, and becomes one of quite a few women to fall for the seductive charms of Lt. Shane Horne (Esco Jouléy), Jungs libidinous heroine. Another is Willys frustrated wife, Sapph (Nicole Villamil) as in Sappho, and yes, she writes poetry.
Virtuosic though Shane is at giving sexual pleasure, she is having trouble with her own orgasms, which for reasons best known to her she refers to as her merries.
Can we not call it that? her psychiatrist, Jess ONope (Marinda Anderson), requests, not unreasonably.
Shane, just out of solitary confinement for having sexed up the generals wife, has a plan to hatch, and she needs Jess help Aeschylus and Euripides being merely two of the sources that Jung (Wolf Play) is riffing on in this frolic through the stacks.
She borrows, too, from William Wycherleys notoriously randy Restoration comedy The Country Wife. Its hero, Horner, spreads a rumor of his own impotence so he can proceed with his many liaisons unsuspected. The version of that in Merry Me involves Jess telling everyone that Shane has turned straight.
This lie is handy for fending off General Memnon (David Ryan Smith), who wants Shane court marshaled for her heretically heterophobic courting habits. It also ensures her freedom to woo women, with Sapph soon topping the list. Except that the pseudo-enlightened Willy (Ryan Spahn) is nowhere near as gullible as his father.
Its a ridiculous, convoluted plot, with only a tenuous logic in its connection to Shanes orgasmic quest, but there is a gleeful, almost punchy abandon to this plays dedication to queer female pleasure, embrace of bawdy fun and relish of theatrical in-jokes.
With shout-outs to Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Thornton Wilder, Merry Me pilfers successfully from Shakespeare (when Sapph dons a mannish disguise that Shane sees right through) and from Tony Kushners Angels in America (which lends a glamorous, comic, sexually skilled Angel, played by Shaunette Renée Wilson). If such a mashup smacks slightly of drama school, Merry Me also has a refreshingly playful spirit that established artists sometimes lose out in the world.
Rachel Haucks set gives an angels-eye view of the base camp, with rows of miniature tents arrayed on a vertical backdrop, and in fact the Angel and her winged colleagues are much concerned with goings-on there. Godlike, they caused the blackout that has paused the war. To lift it, they demand a sacrifice and in this feminist retelling, thats not going to be anybodys daughter.
Pvt. Willy Memnon, theyre looking at you.
Merry Me
Through Nov. 19 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.