Kyle Hall, who directed and adapted Rebecca Brown’s episodic novel The Terrible Girls, takes Brown’s writing, which is intricate, lyrical, and intimate, and creates something wholly different, although he manages to keep intact Brown’s riffs on love, loss, exploitation and sacrifice. Hall’s mighty ambition is displayed in what is essentially a performance piece: a percussive jumble of sight, sound, and stimulation. The music (by the omnipresent team of Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman) is riveting, jolting, syncopatic, and gives an almost primal feel to the proceedings. Peter Sciscioli’s choreography is a perfect match for the music. The dance in The Terrible Girls is hard-edged, sexy, physical, and, at times, almost brutal. If The Terrible Girls had been strictly a performance piece, utilizing its revved-up, yet paradoxically, haunting meshing of movement and sound, it might have been a triumph.
But The Terrible Girls attempts to do a lot more than just enthrall us and set our hearts to racing; it tries to be more than a jumper cable to our eyes and ears. The Terrible Girls also wants to tell us something. In nine spare scenes, director and adapter Kyle Hall also wants to immerse us in Rebecca Brown’s big message, which really, when one considers it closely, isn’t really all that big. Each piece is a mediation, really, on the things we do for love … the sacrifices we make, how we exploit others and let them exploit us, and the losses we encounter in our search for connection. Although that message is told with variety and sometimes wit (the Frankenstein sequence is notable for its goofy, over-the-top Gothic daring), it is the same message, over and over again, for 90 or so minutes. Although scenes like Junk Mail, with Lesley Bevan’s peerless comic delivery a major plus, make us laugh, the stuff between the lines gets stale rather quickly. Writer/poet/drunk Charles Bukowksi once said, “An artist says a difficult thing in a simple way; an intellectual says a simple thing in a difficult way.” About Face, with this effort, veers far toward the intellectual side, in spite of the creativity that’s obvious in almost every minute of this piece.
And that’s a shame, because in addition to the behind the scene talents assembled for this production, director Hall has drawn together one of the most talented group of women you may ever encounter on a stage. Their sensuality, timing, energy, and abilities are amazing: one wonders where one could currently find a superior ensemble cast. Tracee Westmoreland, Elizabeth Laidlaw, De Anna N.J. Brooks, and Julia Neary lead the cast in near-perfect performances—whether they’re dancing, singing, or making us laugh, each of these women demonstrates a talent that is, quite simply, enormous.
About Face gets an A for effort and an A for execution with its Terrible Girls. But, as an artistic achievement, the production rates far lower. In the end, The Terrible Girls has an abundance of style, but a paucity of substance.