Hard sell

Shopping and F***ing: a myth hit

by Bill Rodriguez

SHOPPING AND F***ING. By Mark Ravenhill. Directed by Kate Lohman. With Jim O'Brien, Molly Lloyd, Laurent Andruet, Mark McClure, Nigel Gore. At the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre through October 10.

Shopping and F***ing, despite a self-censored title that screams of sensationalizing hype, is of noble ambition. In his debut play, Brit Mark Ravenhill descends into an appalling world and manages to illuminate it from within so compellingly that we enter willingly, as into a Grimm's forest cottage abuzz with flies. Under Kate Lohman's keen-eyed direction, the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre production is sure-footed and powerful.

Get there early. A Bill Moyers interview with Stygian depths guru Joseph Campbell plays on two monitors, and the myth and archetype context is crucial. The central character, Mark (Jim O'Brien), is on a quest for self-identity. The play opens with him vomiting, at rock bottom and about to check himself into a drug rehab program. When he gets out, he equates emotions with other drugs he has abused and grown addicted to. His strongest feelings have all been chemically induced, so he doesn't trust them any longer. He would rather pay for sex, so that "it doesn't mean anything."

His lover Robbie (Laurent Andruet) is distraught, pained at the breakup. But, weak-willed and childish, he has his roommate Lulu (Molly Lloyd) to mother him. She shoplifts TV dinners for them, which has become virtually the only thing they eat, and when matters are desperate enough she finds them gigs selling ecstasy at a nightclub and phone sex from their apartment.

Shopping and F***ing has plenty to offend even the militantly non-prudish, with its simulations of sex acts that could have made Marat de Sade squeamish. The playwright wanted to make an impression on us about Mark's self-loathing without inducing eye-rolling with tried-and-trite S&M cues. Mark finds a teenaged prostitute, Gary (Mark McClure), to satisfy his scatological predilections. Of course, Gary maliciously shoves him off the wagon regarding his swearing off emotional attachments.

The play says we define ourselves by who and how we fuck and what and who we can buy. It pulls few punches (although we are allowed to avert our eyes from the money shot of a snuff film). And there is only one lie I noticed in this production: Lulu is desperate for a job doing a TV commercial, but she is allowed to strip only to her underwear when the interviewer tells her to disrobe. Since his point was to reduce her to a humiliated, compliant shell, he'd hardly settle for this.

The interviewer's name is Brian (Nigel Gore), and he's nothing so simple as a creep. He insinuates himself into Lulu and Robbie's lives like a cancer. Despite its malevolent core, the above scene is quite funny, actually. With a Lion King mug and lunchbox on his desk, he waxes lyrical and even teary about the Disney animation, about how the innocence of the vulnerable young cub was retained through the trials and betrayals of life. The most chilling aspect of the play is the ability of this character to maintain a proud integrity, inner fires ablaze, regarding two personality components that we like to think are mutually exclusive. He truly loves his musical prodigy son, tearing up as he watches a video of him playing the cello. He wants to protect his innocence, wrap the boy in a cocoon of money and privilege. Brian's life equation is simple: you must be cruel in order to amass money, an accomplishment that allows you to then be generous, munificent, and life-affirming to loved ones. Hitler, after all, was an ol' softy about kids.

Playwright Ravenhill is quite clear about myth being as alive and powerful in our time as when Hector was a pup. Unfortunately, it is television and commercial media that conveys it, instead of sage tribal elders. The power of myth today is used to sell Happy Meals at McDonald's, and an occasional Just War on the six o'clock news.

The SFGT cast is brave, risk-taking. Each of the five ably handles the character revealed beneath the surface when incidents torch off their surface selves: Andruet a man-child who gives away drugs he is supposed to sell, to momentarily create a commerce-free world as brief as a high. Lloyd's optimistic Lulu, finally apoplectic with rage at Robbie for such folly. O'Brien, whose Mark eventually has to drop his guard like an impossibly heavy shield. McClure as the frightened boy searching for a father figure who will punish and perhaps destroy him, whose merging of Eros and Thanatos would make Freud sadly smile. And Gore as the businessman, whose dual nature is a comfortable part of him, like an Iroquois False Face Society mask he can no longer remove.

Shopping and F***ing is bitter medicine but the kind of remedy we need. You can take it. It'll do you good.