The playwright Hansol Jung had a breakout success with Wolf Play, the imaginative and innovative story of an adoptive child who is “rehomed” with a lesbian couple. Her new work, Merry Me, which opened Tuesday at New York Theatre Workshop, has a similarly playful approach to theater. It’s a raunchy sex comedy with a self-consciously queer sensibility, a fourth-wall-busting approach and a gifted cast (under Leigh Silverman’s direction) that is all too aware that they are putting on a show.
It’s also a play that wears its many, many influences on its shoulders just a bit too heavily to really break free and become its own thing. After all, Jung is mashing up everything from Euripides’ Agamemnon to Shakespeare’s gender-bending comedies to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America to, of all things, Marvel’s Avengers movies (particularly Thanos’s finger-snapping halving of all humanity in Infinity War). The setting is a military base in the midst of an Ongoing War, where a butch lesbian soldier (Esco Jouléy) has been busy seducing just about every woman in sight, including the sex-starved wife (Cindy Cheung) of the general (David Ryan Smith).
Now, she’s turning her rizz on the poetic wife (Nicole Villamil) of the general’s wannabe woke white-boy son (Ryan Spahn). And she’s being aided (or at least abetted) by the base’s resident shrink/prophet (Marinda Anderson) and an Angel/narrator (Shaunette Renée Wilson), who sometimes imagines herself to be Beyoncé when she’s not donning the accoutrement of Kushner’s Angel.
There’s a lot going on here, and Jung shows off her gifts for witty wordplay and antic sitcom plotting. Wilson does her best to hold the disparate parts together, but invariably the seams show through. The comedy ultimately recalls a solidly professional college revue, where not all of the punchlines land but a spirit of good will carries us through the rough patches.
There’s a lot of insidery material here, too, including a curious dig at the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park program — which the Angel chides for its poor track record of hiring female directors. Jung’s wording is careful, but you’d be forgiven for concluding (as I did, until I checked the script, and the record) that the Public has never hired a female director for Shakespeare in the Park “in the 69 years since its existence.” (For the record, a mere 16 out of the summer program’s 127 shows have had a female director: Gladys Vaughan helmed multiple shows back in the ’60s, but the 18 shows at the Delacorte in the last decade have had only four female directors; half were nonwhite. In the last decade, by comparison, the New York Theatre Workshop has hired slightly more women than men as directors.)
Not that Jung’s work can be dismissed as agitprop. While there’s a distinct diversity-forward, pro-queer woke agenda at work, her most sharply drawn character may be Private Willy Memnon, the pathetic nepo-baby son of the general who wants to be a good guy but seems flummoxed when the irresistible Lt. Shane Horne seduces first his mom and then his wife, Sapph. Spahn delivers a spot-on performance as Willy, a would-be ally who struggles to overcome his inclination to mansplain and his reluctance to cede space to others. He becomes so sympathetic, in fact, that Jung doesn’t seem to have the heart to kill him off — even as her mythic source material demands it. The forces of comedy, and the good-natured spirit of Merry Me, win out in the end.
Culture Sauce 