Writer: Audrey Lang
Director: Cameron Moreton
Alex, the protagonist in Audrey Lang’s alex getting better, is in a therapy session, trying to come to terms with a traumatic sexual assault at her New York school when she was 13. The therapist, a sympathetic Alice Gold, encourages Alex to seek out her former group of girl friends to find out what they remember.
Erin Maria Walther is an intense, expressive Alex. Throughout most of the performance her friends lie on a bed as if at a teenage sleep-over, companionably painting one another’s nails. In successive scenes, each comes forward to meet Alex in the present. It’s a simple devise that works well in some respects, but we have to believe that these young women, with whom Alex has been out of touch, remain her best friends.
Where this premise works well, however, is in Lang’s tender delineation of the innocent enthusiasms and concerns on these girls on the cusp of puberty. They have been friends since early childhood, still finding comfort in shared fantasies about their cuddly toys. The sexual assault itself is only obliquely referred to. It’s not made clear if the boy Carter assaulted each of them serially in a school corridor, or Alex alone. But we know the girls joined forces to report him and that he was given a brief suspension from school.
It’s now five years on. The friends are now at different colleges and, until Alex insists on discussing the event, have moved on. Jennie is the most dismissive. It transpires she is still friends with Carter. With Ruthie there is an unexpected, blunt admission that she raped a boy when he was 14. But she has ‘owned’ this, and so a potentially interesting parallel with Carter’s attack remains undeveloped. There is a brief discussion of the two girls’ sexuality – Alex is lesbian, Ruthie bi – but these positions, because unexplored, seem formulaic. With Hallie the conversation is about warm memories.
Despite the book-ending of the play with therapy scenes, Lang seems too closely indentified with her protagonist to step outside the small world of these young women. Their shared memories of childhood and early teenage may have its appeal, but the play doesn’t consider the irony of presenting regressive behaviour as the way to deal with trauma.
There are glimpses of Lang’s potential as a playwright, however, in particular the play’s structure and in her device of repeated speeches beginning ‘Something you don’t know about me’ and ‘Little Safer Things’, which chime rhythmically.
Runs until 18 June 2022
