Review - Dark Vanilla Jungle

A handsome chum invited me, sort of spur-of-the-moment, to see a new Philip Ridley piece at HERE last night.  The pair of one-act plays, billed as Tonight/Jungle, has recently gotten a rave review in the NY Times, so I figured...what the heck?  I saw another Philip Ridley play with this handsome chum a few years ago.  Here's some of what I had to say about that play, Tender Napalm: 

"I'll admit that, at times, this piece seemed like a glorified MFA project to me.  The acting and the writing were so artificial.  I really had to fight my way through some of the piece... is this real?  Is it imagined?  Are they crazy?  Do they do this every night?  What the heck is going on????!!!!  Realism and fantasy are intertwined, sometimes in the same monologue.  Even though this kind of writing generally isn't my cup of tea, I acknowledge that this writer is kind of brilliant.  Who else puts stuff together this way?

Again, I don't want to give away too much.  But you get the full gamut here - love, lust, hate, rage, pain, sadism, tenderness, fantasy, reality.  It's not like anything I've ever seen before...I admit to being in and out, fighting myself throughout...Not a lot of laughs to be had, but certainly a lot of cathartic pain...I've been thinking about this play constantly since last night."

I guess this may be my standard response to a Philip Ridley play, because I felt much the same way during and after Dark Vanilla Jungle (I thought both one-act plays of Tonight/Jungle were running each night, but it turns out they run in repertory).   I think, on the whole, I enjoyed the experience of watching Tender Napalm more than the play we saw last night, because I didn't quite get on board as fully last night as I probably should have, and by the end, I was frustrated by the whole thing.  I guess spoilers will follow.

photo credit: Hunter Canning

Dark Vanilla Jungle is a one-woman monologue, about a young girl named Andrea, who is seemingly telling us a story about her life:  about her parents, then her own (supposed) love affair, and then all of the terrifying consequences afterward.  The monologue is sometimes like an onion, with layer after layer peeling off.  Is she in a police holding room?  A mental hospital?  Hell?  We're not sure.  The monologue plays with time and place; sometimes, it's as if we're listening to Andrea relay events, sometimes we're in the middle of reenactments of events, and other times, I don't know where the heck we were.  I thought the performer, Robyn Kerr, was quite good at engaging us and drawing us into her world - she was very charming and ingratiating - but as the piece got darker and more complicated, she had to go to extremes in her storytelling methods.  Often, those extremes turned me off, through no fault of hers, I should add, and I felt unsatisfied by the end and ready for the whole thing to be over.  I wasn't convinced.  Maybe there was just too much.

After seeing the play last night, I read a little bit about it on my way home; it was originally done a few years ago in England and Scotland.  Maybe I'm just too American and too Pollyanna-ish, but I didn't get the societal plot point (as described in other pieces written about the play) that she was involved with a gang that sold young girls for sex, I just thought she was a girl who was taken advantage of by an unscrupulous older man.  Yes, I understood that he took her to sex parties, but I guess I didn't identify the institutional nature of what happened to her.  I saw her naivete and complete domination by a cretin and I saw her devastation at the loss of her love and stability, and I saw how she gradually became unhinged, but I couldn't wrap my brain around how the stories she told us during the early portion of the evening could even happen amidst the absolute obsessive madness that took over by the end of the play.  Again, like Tender Napalm, I wondered about the storytelling devices, if this was the way she always told this story?  Or does the story even exist inside the mind of a child who's actually lost her mind?  I guess maybe the questions are what Ridley is after, but I just found them off-putting and ultimately alienating for the sake of being alienating.  I wasn't affected the way I should've been.  I had been under the impression I should feel sympathy for Andrea, and I did, don't get me wrong, no young girl should be treated the way she has been treated, but by turning the monologue into something so unknowable, it made it hard to connect anymore.  I'm sure I'm not even making any sense - I've been having a hard time all day trying to craft this review, I have to admit - but I guess maybe my fractured thoughts reflect the fractured nature of the mind in the play.

But, again, even with my displeasure with how things were being presented, I did have to marvel at Ridley's use of language - the minute details Andrea relays are so fascinating and so true to life.  The turns of phrase and the imagery and poetry found inside the often-seamy and horrifying story were sometimes very beautiful, and the characterization of Andrea was excellent.  And I wanted to stay on board this time, I really did, but I just got lost somewhere.  Maybe I'm not meant to connect to his work, which is frustrating, because I find so much good in it, but I guess it's my problem.  There's value in the frustration, I suppose, at least it's making me feel something.  I just wished I was in some way satisfied by the frustration.  Oh well.  On to the next.