SR review: “I Wanna F#!&ing Tear You Apart” at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble
Two best friends’ intense relationship threatens to keep them both in stasis in Morgan Gould’s comedy of co-dependency
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Two best friends’ intense relationship threatens to keep them both in stasis in Morgan Gould’s comedy of co-dependency
Theater review by Kris Vire
Robert Quintanilla and Teressa LaGamba
In Morgan Gould’s portrait of a deeply, deeply co-dependent friendship, Sam (Teressa LaGamba) and Leo (Robert Quintanilla) refer to themselves, at least privately, as “Team FatGay”—she’s fat, he’s gay, and they’re bunkered together against the world. The pair are best friends since college and still living together as roommates in their early 30s. They’re supportive of each other’s incipient writing careers and reinforce each other’s sense of fabulousness, but they also indulge one another’s most sophomoric and self-destructive tendencies.
Their mutually enabling balance is disrupted when Leo finds a new friend at his day job creating content for “a knockoff BuzzFeed.” Leo’s new “work wife,” Chloe (Jessica Ervin), is petite, privileged, and jumps too quickly on her first meeting of Sam into which Sex and the City character each of them “is.” Sam has one hundred percent discussed that very topic extensively with Leo (“she’s a Miranda,” he interjects), but hearing it from Chloe, you can see Sam’s instant verdict written all over her face: ya basic. The threat Sam feels from this new person in Leo’s life drives the play toward its hard-to-swallow big twist.
Teressa LaGamba, Robert Quintanilla and Jessica Ervin
We never see Sam or Leo outside of their apartment until the play’s final coda, but Sam seems to do all right for herself in the outside world. Her freelance work writing copy and ghostwriting young-adult novels pays well enough for her to frequently lend Leo money or cover dinner for both of them, thus increasing his indebtedness to her. (“You always pay,” he says when she brings home Chinese takeout. “You always let me,” she retorts.)
The debut novel Sam is working on has literary agents coming to call, and she has what everyone agrees is “a hot boyfriend,” who appears to support her unconditionally despite knowing that he’s low on her list of priorities—number six, to be precise. (We meet him briefly, emerging from Sam’s bedroom in boxer shorts to say hello to Leo; that the actor portraying him is neither credited in the program nor returns for the curtain call reinforces, I guess, how much Sam takes him for granted.)
So Sam’s attachment to and possessiveness of Leo reads, perhaps, as a kind of vestigial armor from a less confident time in their lives. Inside the apartment, they’re still sniping at mutual acquaintances, hollering at the TV through marathons of Grey’s Anatomy or Top Chef, and generally performing their friendship at each other—up to and including an extended lip sync and dance-off set to the finale sequence of Sister Act 2.
Robert Quintanilla and Teressa LaGamba
That sequence is fun, to be sure, but it’s also a full stop in the middle of Gould’s story. The entire first hour of the play’s intermissionless 100 minutes feels similarly dialed up to 11—up to and including Chloe’s cringey first scene, when, wasted on two glasses of rosé, she implicitly suggests that Sam’s hot boyfriend likes her in spite of her size.
LaGamba’s face freezes into a mask of detachment in that moment, and you can see three decades’ worth of Sam’s defense mechanisms kicking back into place. It’s a nicely observed, relatively quiet moment. Quintanilla and Ervin get some of those later as well, as Gould introduces new shades and complications amid the continuing ugly behavior. But by the time we get there in the play’s final third, we’re already pretty exhausted from the onslaught of other people’s in-jokes and bits.
I Wanna Fucking Tear You Apart
Rivendell Theatre Ensemble (5779 N Ridge Ave). By Morgan Gould. Directed by Jessica Fisch.
Cast: Teressa LaGamba (Sam), Robert Quintanilla (Leo), Jessica Ervin (Chloe).
Designers: Regina García (scenic), Tony Churchill (projections), Heather Gilbert (lighting), Alison Siple (costumes), Jeffrey Levin (sound and original music), Jonathan Berg-Einhorn (props), Gina Marie Hayes (drag consultant).
Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes; no intermission. Through March 23. Tickets ($28–$38) at rivendelltheatre.org.
Photographs by Michael Brosilow.
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