Review by Arlene McKanic

     The Heist

     In Paul Cohen’s razor sharp satire Heist, the stage of The Sargent Theatre is split in two: stage left, all is black, white, gray and industrial. Two young women, the Blowfish and the Sturgeon, work on laptops, and the walls are hung with schematics. Stage right is covered in pink draperies, including a pink and magenta thing that looks sort of like a tent. It is, infact, no such thing, unless one considers the vajayjay of Indira Gandhi a big tent. Yes, this is a depiction of Indira’s genitalia, complete with labia minoris lined with tiny lights. 

More, we will also meet the pudenda of Barbara Kingsolver, Terrie Gross of NPR (which has a nice fluffy fringe of pubic hair),  and Harriet Tubman, thanks to a performer who calls herself Ophelia. Now, this is what both sides of the stage have to do with each other: the women, accompanied by a young man called Sea Horse, are planning a jewelry heist in the store adjacent to the theater where Ophelia’s performance art will take place. Their original plan is to cover their blowing up of the vault with the sound of a young woman experiencing sexual ecstasy at the same time India separates violently from Pakistan.
    

Of course, this all goes awry in ways that are astonishing, comical and bent as a Mobius strip.  Perhaps someone sharper than me could see the twist ending coming, but I certainly couldn't.
    

The characters make much of Cohen’s biting and inventive dialogue, especially Tracy Weller’s Ophelia, star of the one woman show. Dressed in a dingy pink nightgown and done up to resemble a cross between Catherine Deneuve and Shahna, the chick in the tinfoil bikini from Star Trek’s Gamesters of Triskelion, she is an avatar of radical feminist nuttiness. 

It’s no wonder that Jeff Clarke’s Sea Horse, who’s lured away her soundman (Sea Horse’s crew has decided they need not one but two explosions) falls in love with her after trying to butter her up.  Clarke’s performance hits just the right pitch of ridiculousness as he slowly falls for his own scam. As he puts it, he discovers his “vagenius” (great word)! Rachel Jablin is great as the sexy but cold-minded Sturgeon, and Amanda Boekelheide is both hilarious and menacing as The Blowfish, the rangy, black clad explosives expert whose pride in being an Irish Jew is inordinate; what she ultimately finds in that vault nearly blows her tiny mind.  Christopher Ryan Richards is appropriately supercilious as the blogger/reviewer who was once Ophelia’s lover, (“I do not review, I shape destiny!”) and who is unsuccessfully pressured to shape the destiny of Ophelia’s appalling show for the better. And then there’s the mysterious gentleman with the dark glasses and pencil mustache and foreign accent who meets now and then with the Blowfish to discuss their share of the take, and the even more mysterious entity they work for, known only as The Void.
    

Kris Thor directs this mess with great verve; he was also the set designer. He was helped by Michelle Koch as the costume designer and Lucrecia Briceno’s dramatic lighting design -- the scenes begin with wincing of the fluorescent lights above the worktable, and those lights around Indira’s labia? Priceless.
    

Of course, Cohen makes nasty fun of all those pretentious downtown types who put on shows about vaginas, fat headed reviewers, and crooks who like to brag about their skills and connections till their best laid plans go to smash. Snickers as well as guffaws are in order.
    

At the end of the show the reviewer discovered a vagina on the floor at her feet. She picked it up. It was squishy and somewhat damp. She wondered whose it was, then replaced it on the stage apron.
    

Heist, presented by ElfQueen Productions, will be at The Sargent Theatre till June 28.

 

Have a show you would like the Gazette to review? Contact Arne McKanic directly    DEAR ARLENE

The Framer