REVIEWS

8.18.07: Hot N' Throbbing at Minneapolis Theatre Garage
By: Jaime Kleiman

Paula Vogel is not the subtlest of playwrights. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning play, How I Learned to Drive, she dealt explicitly with incest; a lesser known play, The Oldest Profession, is about three old women on a bench reminiscing about their lives as prostitutes. Her seriocomic-feminist approach can yield phenomenal work (Drive and The Baltimore Waltz are at the top of this list), or it can birth heavy-handed diatribes such as Hot N' Throbbing, which opened this weekend at the Minneapolis Theatre Garage, produced by 20% Theatre Company. Thankfully, this production is very good, so it's easy to overlook most of the sticky wickets.

Hot N' Throbbing depicts a world where women are beat up, vilified for being out of control, and generally get the sh*t end of the stick. Hoary stuff, right? Thankfully, director Claire Avitabile keeps it light—as light as a play about domestic abuse can be, anyway. This emotionally taut production highlights some of our society's darkest secrets and isn't easy to watch.

The play opens with two erotically charged characters slinking around in their own film noir fantasy. He's a detective and she's a playful dame. It turns out that they're both characters in the screenplay our heroine, Charlene, is trying desperately to complete before deadline. Charlene is the mother of two wound-up adolescents on the brink of sexual revelation. To pay the bills, she's started a women-centered production house called Gyno Productions. As a mother and provider, she's stretched thin. As a woman, she's lonely, and lives out some of her sexual desires through her work.

For various reasons, including writer's block and a teenage daughter who has yet to comprehend the effect of her cleavage on men, Charlene can't finish her screenplay. Oddly, she seems somewhat relieved by the final and most disturbing disruption of the night—her drunken husband, Clyde, who breaks her door down, upset about the restraining order she's put on him (gee, I wonder why). She shoots him in the butt and suddenly her evening has gotten a lot more interesting. Instead of writing a script, she gets to live one, to a lugubrious conclusion.

Clyde is at the heart of this play, and Jeff Broitman goes the distance and then some, portraying Clyde as all sinew and sex, alcohol and rage. As the night wears on, Broitman reveals Clyde's complexities and vulnerability. We start to like the creep. Broitman is also the most charismatic actor onstage, which doesn't hurt.

Without a doubt, Hot N' Throbbing is a horrifying play as well as an important one, and Avitabile makes sure her audience goes home with a greater awareness of what can happen behind closed doors. I did not sleep easily last night, but when I awoke, I was grateful for the reminder.

ON THE TOWNSEND, Lavendar Magazine:

When lesbian playwright and Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel wrote Hot N’ Throbbing in the 1990s, she wasn’t advocating censorship of sexually oriented material. Rather, she considered that porn, like guns, in the hands of unstable minds, can trigger catastrophe.

Tragically, Vogel’s gripping masterwork, produced this month by the passionate 20% Theatre Company, is perhaps more urgent now given the vastly increased patronage of online porn since the play premiered over a decade ago. Moreover, Vogel homes in on the specter of male violence—something much in the news lately from grisly horrors inflicted by wrestler Chris Benoit on his own family to state-sanctioned torture under President Bush.

Director Claire Avitable was drawn to Hot N’ Throbbing on a gut level. “As a survivor myself, and daughter of a survivor of domestic-sexual violence and as a citizen who is sickened by the fact that the media no longer broadcasts stories of domestic abuse because it is just too common, this play needs to be done,” Avitable explains. “Just because we don’t hear about it anymore doesn’t mean it has stopped. But it needs to stop.”

The 20% Theatre Company, Twin Cities, launches its second season this weekend with Paula Vogel's early-'90s theater grenade about pornography and domestic abuse (Vogel wrote it when the culture wars were in a particularly hot phase, with the NEA under attack). When the play begins, Charlene (Mykel Pennington) and Clyde (Jeff Broitman) are divorced. To make ends meet, Charlene writes screenplays for erotic films to support herself and her two children, while trying to fend off the alcoholic and physically abusive Clyde, who has yet to digest the news that his marriage is over. All the while, their two children are in adolescent overdrive, a state made all the more complex by their parents' lives and proclivities. Director Claire Avitabile stage-managed the play in college several years ago and found resonance in it, she says, because elements of the action "were unfortunately part of my past." Avitabile was happy with that show, but "because it was a college production it didn't have the same impact, because the actors were all roughly the same age." In this show at the Theater Garage, the actors are roughly the same age as the characters they portray, from teenagers to thirtysomethings. Adding to the complexity are Joe Swanson and Kari Hammer, who play "The Voice" and "Voice-Over," respectively, verbalizing the play's conscience, speaking directly to characters as a chorus, and even (in Swanson's case) assuming the role of a detective trying to unravel the action. Hot 'n' Throbbing promises to be a meditation on the contemporary family in all its ambiguity and shades of gray. Avitabile insists it's not a moralistic or preachy work; she also mentions that it contains more than its share of humor, albeit of the darkly shaded variety.