On Sundays Gothamist runs opinion pieces relevant to life in New York and reviews of recent books and performances. The judgments expressed below are entirely those of the author.
Sitting in the audience of cagelove it can be hard to keep yourself from yelling out to the stage, talking back to the actors in a way more usually associated with watching TV shows. Christopher Denham’s play has some flaws in both writing and execution, but it is emphatically engaging, and that characteristic goes quite a long way toward smoothing over its problems. In the same way that people often mock at least some aspects of the soap operas or long-running prime-time dramas, and hate some of their characters, cagelove has parts that will likely make you roll your eyes or grit your teeth – but you can’t help but get involved in it, wrapped up in the lives you see unraveling on stage, which is more than one can say about a lot of the fare that theatergoers are expected to subject themselves to passively.
Denham is a published author of horror stories and has written and directed horror films, and this experience and evident affinity for that genre show here, though the play starts harmlessly enough. Katie (Gillian Jacobs) is a wild-child photographer, or at least she was; now she is engaged to Sam (Daniel Eric Gold), a straight-laced, mostly mild-mannered, successful computer engineer who adores her. Well, we’re supposed to believe that he adores her and that she loves him back, if not quite as completely; one weak aspect of the play is how hard it is to understand or go along with their purported love. The time when the pair fell in love is well into the past, and now they’re going through major difficulties since Katie has been raped by a former lover. She’s unwilling to talk to Sam about what happened, and that combined with her increasingly erratic behavior as the confines of married life encroach upon her, make Sam suspicious and jealous. The result is that there’s pretty much no point in the play when the two seem mutually attracted to each other, and it’s a stretch to imagine their characters getting together in the first place, much less getting engaged. The third person in the play, Katie’s sister Ellen (Emily Cass McDonnell), whose primary function appears to be to reveal Katie’s past (usually at awkward moments, to Katie’s fury), offers some insight into her sister’s thinking, but Katie and Sam’s relationship nonetheless remained incomprehensible to me, despite Jacobs’ and Gold’s otherwise convincing acting. Of course, real-world relationships are often hard to understand too, it’s true, but this one just seems extra unlikely, and that’s somewhat distracting.
