Photo credit: Roundabout Theater Company
Theater Review: Usual Girls by Ming Peiffer at the Roundabout Theater Company
Ming Peiffer crafts a bold and unwavering narrative of childhood's innocence and adulthood's indignities in her new play, Usual Girls, staged by the Roundabout Theater Company under the directorship of Tyne Rafaeli. The play is a bildungsroman, not of a great hero, but of a young girl as she enters, explores, and is beaten down by the world of reprehensible men, traitorous women, and unrelenting humiliation. The play is not easy to watch; as a matter of fact, it is very, very hard. And that's a good thing: the play depicts, in the barest, most unvarnished form, both the everyday embarrassments and the life-changing violence that far too many people must endure. Through her portrayal of such events, Peiffer compels us to wonder how we created such a monstrous society, and how we can begin to undo and rebuild it.Usual Girls strikes with little warning. One steps into a small theater bathed in bubblegum-pink light. At showtime, ushers quietly close the doors, and then, without warning, the theater is plunged into darkness as loud pop music blares overhead. When light returns, we are introduced to Kyeoung (Midori Francis), the protagonist, and two of her friends. The play unfolds as a series of vignettes tracking the growth and maturation of Kyeoung, with each scene separated from another with the same darkness and music. With each passing scene, the play takes turns for the darker, and the apparently harmless encounters resurface in a much more problematic light: a playground bully who threatens tattling unless he gets a kiss morphs into a partygoer spreading rumors of Kyeoung's personal life; smooches to stuffed animals at a sleepover become a peck on the cheek to a sexual assailant. The music between each scene offers a similar experience: at first, it seems merely to startle and cover the sound of stage techs; however, as the play progresses, one notices that the lyrics celebrate, with profanity and slurs, all that which this play condemns.
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A setting as innocuous as a slumber party of pre-teens can highlight the social rot and perversity to which even very young children are exposed. One girl, Sasha, receives the dare to drop her pajama pants and underwear; after much hesitation, she acquiesces, but prefaces by saying, rapid-fire, that "I-got-my-period-last-week-and-I-get-it-if-you-don't-want-to-be-friends-anymore" before exposing, for a few very long seconds, a groin full of pubic hair. The girls (and the audience) sit in stunned silence before the barrage of questions begin: when did she get it, how long has it been, why did she never tell them, on and on. As it dawns on Sasha that the questions are not of interrogation but of admiration, she relaxes, and then revels in the attention, declaring with pride that she's also been allowed to shave her legs; the other girls shriek in delight and jealousy and ask if they may pretty please feel her legs. Such obsessing can appear heavy-handed, but Peiffer's skill is in representing the obsession in a realistic way: your correspondent can say that the girls' fascination evoked memories of boys discussing in hushed tones the intricacies of sex and dating during junior- and early-high-school years. These girls' near-predatory curiosity—how they mobbed poor Sasha!—is the inevitable consequence of growing up alongside sex-heavy advertisements, mass media, and even dinner-table conversations (whose elder siblings or parents haven't brought up dating and infidelity during a meal?); this ubiquity of sex is the true target of Peiffer's criticism. Unfortunately, this scene also contains the most out-of-place moment in the play: a gang of older boys begin banging on a sliding-glass door, demanding that the girls expose themselves; whether for their own pleasure or the girls' embarrassment isn't made clear. Drawing the contrast between the girls' questioning and the boys' demanding may have some merit, but by going from realism to horror (complete with jump-scares), Peiffer diminishes the strength of her message and makes the whole scene farcical.
The scene after the next contains the most discomfiting, and thus the most powerful, moment of the play: Peiffer uses the ritual of shaving pubic hair—at once incredibly personal and bordering on mundane—to articulate her incisive and poignant criticism. Kyeoung, now dressed as a young teen-ager, appears on stage with shaving cream and a razor. In dialogue with her older counterpart (Jennifer Lim), Kyeoung nonchalantly, and one might even say brightly, describes how she is going to go about shaving herself: "'I'm going to prop my foot up—' '—and you're not going to trip—' '—because if I do, I'll cut off my clitoris!'" Lim's expressions of horror provide a striking counterpoint to Francis's matter-of-factness; even more striking, though, is Francis exposing herself to Lim (and to the audience) to be shaved. The scene is almost unbearable to watch: other theatergoers had averted their eyes; your correspondent could feel his insides knotting up. Finally, the older Kyeoung steps back; the younger Kyeoung, still nude, touches herself, and then asks, disarmingly eagerly, "Am I pretty yet?" This scene exemplifies both the precision of Peiffer's writing and the skill of Francis's acting; in less adept hands, this scene could have appeared overwrought or absurdist, but both conception and execution were par excellence. Due to adult magazines and modern pornography, shaving pubic hair has become just one more way of molding ourselves closer to the "ideal form." Peiffer shows the true motivations behind many a person's trim: to appear "pretty." However, by failing to comment on those who are personally at ease with shaving, the play seems to present an argument—that all beauty standards are constructs without merit or value—that it either does not bother to or cannot thoroughly support. This consideration, though problematic when considering the play in its broader, sociopolitical context, thankfully does not take away from the theatrical experience.
The final moments of each scene tend to have something of a dramatic flourish to them, whether that be a parent walking in on pre-teens engaging in mock-intercourse with their oversized teddy bears or the aforementioned "Am I pretty yet?" Sometimes these make for satisfying ends to each vignette, while at others they can feel heavy-handed, even lazy. Most of the time, Peiffer manages to create endings more fulfilling than not; however, the final moment of the play unfortunately is also its weakest. The scene is set in a relatively full subway, with the only character interaction being an incoherently muttering, likely homeless man masturbating to Kyeoung. Instead of furthering this encounter, the older Kyeoung (Lim), who is not present in the scene, faces the audience and speaks the final line of the play: "It never stops." Important as that message may be, the in-your-face closing made for a hasty coda. Despite that misstep and others of varying severity along the way, Usual Girls provided both amusing one-liners and unforgiving intimacy while contending with one of the most ubiquitous and serious social issues of our time.
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George Orwell wrote in 1984 that "the best books are those that tell you what you already know." In that sense, Usual Girls is a superlative play: the ideas it presents—the grotesque obsession with sex and sexuality that our society inculcates from childhood, the casual abuse suffered by many high school students at the hands of their peers, the debilitating burden of the female gender role—are at once distinctly familiar and (in part due to that familiarity) unpleasantly visceral. And it should be—for how did it become accepted, and even encouraged, for one half of the population in an ostensibly equal society to act agreeably rather than honestly, subserviently rather than assertively, and with respect rather than with self-respect?
The true power of Usual Girls lies in its ability to expose so brilliantly the hypocrisies we all tacitly condone—with our time spent listening to the misogynistic and materialistic music of so-called artists; with our dollars given to fashion companies that reinforce narrow beauty standards; with our votes given to officials who restrict the rights, resources, and power of the already-disenfranchised. But at its best, the play is as subtle as the issues it raises are far-reaching: the offhand one-liners and the slump of Kyeoung's shoulders can betray societal biases and the psychological repercussions thereof. The play has grand ambitions, and, like anything which seeks to say something about everything, it inevitably falls short in some respects. But what it does say—that we oughtn't be constrained by our self-image, that people can be cruel for no apparent reason at all, that at day's end the person who has to live with your decisions is you—makes the play a splendid work of our time and heralds a bright new voice in American theater.
[Written 2018; lightly revised 2022]