There’s a too-muchness to Eisa Davis’s new play with music that goes beyond the overstuffed typography of the title. ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| is an evocation of female adolescence that touches on everything from depression to bulimia to homelessness to queer longing to the struggle to achieve something great and leave a mark in the world. In this mesmerizing but somewhat unwieldy new drama, there are also references to Buddhism and whether life unfolds by chance or in a series of predetermined outcomes.
That last question is particularly relevant to Fax (Hillary Fisher), a talented young singer enrolled in a summer music program for girls in the Bay Area from disadvantaged backgrounds. She’s an inveterate rule-follower and rehearser who melts down after a recital performance of a Rossini aria (beautifully sung) when her accompanist, Rile (Yeena Sung), loses her place on the keyboard and begins to riff. “You can’t go rogue on a composed piece like that,” Fax chastises her afterward. But when Fax gets to know Margot (Naomi Latta), an ultra-gifted percussionist who conjures new rhythmic compositions from thin air, she learns to embrace the concept of improvisation both in her music and her life.
The audacity of Davis’s vision for the play is astounding, beginning with an early scene where the four cast members sing a 12-note tone row whose sequence is determined by audience members placing numbered stickers on a whiteboard of piano keys ahead of the performance. These aleatoric riffs are repeated, and improvised upon, throughout the show. It’s telling that this is a female-only space (and show), free of the distraction of boys who, in Fax’s telling, “think it’s fun to humiliate you and win. … they’re going beyond behavior and criticizing your being.” Among other girls, she is more awake to the possibility of experimentation without judgement.
The cast — which also includes Ginanna DiGregorio Rivera as a self-described “grind” who spends all her time practicing on wind instruments — convey both the innate talent of nascent music stars but also the awkward insecurity of teens who are on much shakier ground outside of a rehearsal studio or recital hall. They can rattle off their new fave musicians and influences one minute, then turn sullen or lash out when they think they’re being snubbed.
Fisher, a chatterbox of a narrator who opens up like a spring flower in the presence of her less structure-minded pals, has a piercingly sweet voice and appealing matter-of-factness. And Latta brings a wide-eyed girlishness to Margot, a girl whose openness fuels her innate musicality but who turns shy when the question turns to her shaky home life. Meanwhile, Sung imbues Rile with a determination to follow through on her pursuits despite hints that she might occasionally be over-stepping — that includes tracking down the donor dad her lesbian mom used to give birth to her.
Many plays struggle to create one new character we’re interested in following. Davis has conjured three, and that goes a long way to cover for some of the infelicities of a plot that can rely on soap operatic machinations, misunderstandings, and external forces, including a climactic hurricane that literally shakes up all three main characters. The play could benefit from some tightening and focus. One character delivers flash-forward speeches about how she turns out as an adult, for no compelling reason, while the others do not. Issues like suicide and eating disorders are casually invoked as if they are character traits, instead of challenges that require serious attention and vigilance to address. (I’m also not sure that we even need DiGregorio Rivera’s flute- and sax-playing Clementine, a hanger-on who gets a perfunctory backstory in the play’s final minutes.)
But under Pam MacKinnon’s deeply humanistic direction, the main trio of ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| seize our attention with an admirable fierceness and refuse to release their grip on us. That’s particularly true during a jazz-inflected triplet performed halfway through the show, where Fisher’s Fax finally relinquishes her type-A tendencies and lets loose in an enchanting, improvisational-seeming riff: “tossed by a wave, it’s a fight to surrender / loosn’nin’ my fibers till I’m good and tender,” she sings with syncopated, melismatic abandon. It’s a riveting moment, both musically sophisticated and dramatically resonant. I wished that the creators had added an intermission right afterward so that we could better appreciate the composition’s power.
Not that I wanted a longer show. At its best, ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| nails something essential and true about kids in all those youth arts programs for the gifted and talented. The skills are real, but sometimes raw and in need of training. The emotions are big, but often expressed awkwardly or immaturely. Whether by chance or predetermination, though, you want them all to succeed and find their place in the melody. And in the world. ā ā ā ā ā
||: GIRLS :||: CHANCE :||: MUSIC :||
Vineyard Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through June 21 for $44 to $107