“More cerebral than visceral, the performances and visuals elevate a promising script that builds up to an unsatisfying climax.”
This is not a play about porn. This is a play about addiction, grief and misogyny.
Ani (played by Ambika Mod) is a successful young academic whose career is on the rise whilst her personal life is in freefall. Overwhelmed by her mother’s death, she is unable to take pride in her professional achievements or consider her future. Cutting through this downward spiral is her addiction to violent pornography which infiltrates every aspect of her life. It affects all her relationships.
There are two elements to her descent into addiction- the frequency of use and the content she watches. The frequency is addressed throughout, eventually leading to a spectacular scene where realism and absurdism blur perfectly. What is less explored is the content. It is never made clear why she is into violent pornography, nor what it is. For some people it is bondage and humiliation, for others it is breaking and bruising skin or even criminal acts.
Every single actor is committed to their roles, every character utterly convincing and believable. My issue lies in the promise of the premise. This is an 18+ show called Porn Play. I was made to wear shoe covers, leading me to think there would be some sort of splash zone. I expected there to be nudity, maybe projections, images or otherwise of sexual acts. I expected it to be provocative, if not downright shocking. When I tell you I saw more nudity in Disney’s Frozen musical I am not joking. This play could be about any addiction. I understand why it is about pornography- and the feminist angle is intriguing. However it feels like a gimmick (“clit-bait”, you could say) to use such a salacious title and then never explore it. Sure, it’s a distraction from processing grief. Sure, the Milton and biblical metaphors makes sense. But it feels like the writer misses a huge opportunity to actually explore Ani’s base desires. At first I was convinced she just needed a new partner to indulge in a healthy BDSM sex life. Then when the pivotal scene with student Sam takes place, we learn that she doesn’t want the same thing she watches. The scene isn’t shocking because of the vanilla bondage (belt tying her hands, blindfold on). It’s shocking because it exposes Sam’s desire for violence rather than Ani’s desire for submissiveness and humiliation.
Yimei Zhao’s set is sensational. A beige 70s style conversation pit which evokes a vulva with the action taking place in the clitoris. Various props and set pieces emerge from the “labia” to almost comedic effect- at one point a medical examination table emerges.
The play is both too much and too little. The heavy handed literary and religious references are expositional to the point of banality, whilst there is not much actual sexual content that isn’t a hint or reference. The show, sad and poignantly anticlimactic, is basically a metaphor for Ani herself- we never once see her orgasm. Constantly interrupted for various appropriate and bleak reasons, she is never allowed to find release.
More cerebral than visceral, Sophia Chetin-Leuner’s treatise on addiction and isolation is a cleverly written play with plenty of promise that needs to stop edging its audience and show us what it really wants to say.