NEW YORK, NY..- So unexpected, contrarian and maximalist are the musicals of Michael R. Jackson that I spend a lot of time between them wondering what he’ll do next. First came “A Strange Loop,” about a “fat, Black, queer” man stuck in a cycle of shame by his faith. Then came “White Girl in Danger,” about soap opera characters so privileged and confident they feel total freedom to do what they like.
Now, in collaboration with Anna K. Jacobs, comes the remix, “Teeth,” which opened Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons. It too is a show about faith and shame, but as experienced by an alpha white girl in the most biting ways.
Literally.
“Teeth,” with music by Jacobs, lyrics by Jackson and a book by both, manifests all three elements of the Jackson formula. Based on the 2007 cult horror film by Mitchell Lichtenstein, it is a parable set in motion by a young woman’s discovery of vaginal incisors that spring shut when sexual violence is done to her. Living in a paternalistic faith community, where men believe (as one lyric has it) “the weaker sex has weakened us,” such violence is never far away — and so neither is dismemberment.
Well, if you don’t want to see bloody amputated penises, why come to the theater?
Perhaps for Jackson’s provocative mix of high-mindedness and low satire. Both are fully evident in Sarah Benson’s production, even if they never blend into a satisfying whole.
The low satire, mostly in the setup, is the more successful tactic. It offers a winking subversiveness and plenty of laughs, especially in the catchy pop-rock tunes with their sharp, smutty rhymes. About the only ones I can repeat here are “gravity/cavity” and “zucchini/weenie.”
But the elaborate ideological superstructure is also rewarding at first. It puts the tale in the context of current culture wars between those who seek to restore male dominance and the supposedly castrating women they call tools of the “feminocracy.”
This conflict plays out among the teenagers of New Testament Village, an evangelical church in a town called Eden, where Promise Keepers wear purity rings and swear to maintain their virginity until marriage. Dawn O’Keefe (Alyse Alan Louis) is their queen, upbeat and upright. Yet even she is terrified of succumbing to her urges lest she become, like the friend who recently “got herself” pregnant, a pariah.
The weird men around her don’t help. One is her grudge-holding stepbrother (Will Connolly), a quasi-incel with a virtual-reality guru who urges him to shed his “low vibration masculinity.” The other is her violent stepfather, who, in this version, is also the church’s parson (Steven Pasquale). “Where is your fig leaf?” he shouts at the Promise Keepers. “Where is your shame?”
The real source of Dawn’s terror, though, is not familial or theocratic but erotic. Though the song she sings with her hunky boyfriend (Jason Gotay) is a sweet midtempo number called “Modest Is Hottest,” their sublimated lust is barely sub. And when even her gay bestie (Jared Loftin) turns out to have the hots for her, where’s a girl to turn?
If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll recall how Dawn discovers she’s the hostess with the mostest — and also who first falls victim to her outraged dentata.
Still, you won’t be prepared for the full-on gore-fest the musical becomes. Joined by the former Promise Keeper girls, who transform into sadistic demigoddesses commanding an army of zombified manservants, Dawn claims many more victims than in the film. In the authors’ view, those victims include Dawn herself; she is a casualty not just of misogyny but also of her vengeance against it.
Despite that explanation, the transition from camp to grand guignol feels like an overreach. Not that “Teeth” was ever going to be naturalistic; the tale, by its nature, is satirical, if grisly. But Dawn and the others too often change because the ideological template requires it — not because it makes sense. That’s especially damaging in a musical, which requires characters to sing from facts and feelings, not agendas.
The agenda being enormous — nothing less than a wholesale rethinking of sex and shame in human culture — the appealing cast is forced to spend the show’s second half in massive overdrive. The songs, previously light and amusing, become thick and grating, and the dances, by Raja Feather Kelly, become trudges. At least Pasquale, in a secondary incarnation as a surprised gynecologist, gets a creepy, comic, toe-tapping ode to “spelunking in the birth canal.” But that hat tip to the dentist’s song in “Little Shop of Horrors” is the last we hear of subtlety.
I find the result a bit mystifying. Jackson is a major talent, and Jacobs, in her off-Broadway debut, is already highly accomplished. Benson, in her stagings of “Fairview” and “An Octoroon,” has proved herself the kind of director who can deftly manage complex genre pastiche. But in “Teeth,” I’m sorry to say, this holy trinity has bitten off more than it can chew.
‘Teeth’
Through April 14 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
