There’s nothing like an infusion of new blood
to get an old cause back on track…which is what New Exhibition Room has
accomplished with their comic, ensemble-devised mini play, EEP! Show, about
Barbie doll thinking (@ BPT through Aug. 17th). When you leave the
theater, you’re thinking about women’s rights again.
Mattel has kept up with the times (Who knew?)
by selling a “medical Barbie” and a “Barbie with curves” to satisfy critics who
complained that the old Barbie dolls were influencing little girls to think
they had to be thin and perfect (not to mention white). The NER show let’s us
see the real woman inside “Barbie Doll Bride” and “Malibu Barbie” and their
ilk.
Director A. Nora Long and company have a
grand time showing us the physical limitations of stiff arms and no elbows: The
dolls miss their mouths when they try to eat and fall all over each other,
attempting to brawl. But the real women behind the Barbie masks worry about the
anemic condition of feminism today. (Some pundits have even declared feminism
dead.)
Why, NER posits, is a corporation functioning
as a “person” when women can’t! We can’t even get an Equal Rights Amendment
ratified. (I’ve often wondered why the Nat’l Organization for Women caved after
the ERA was defeated.) So here are a group of smart women starting to talk
about it, making theater out of it, and encouraging audiences to make a
political noise about it. Hooray.
Sydney Barsky-Russo, who’s eleven, is a
delight as the little girl with the Barbies who dreams about her dolls coming
to life. Shalaye Camillo is deadpan hilarious as the medical Barbie, blissfully
unaware that a baby doll is strapped to her arm. (There’s a delicious moment
when it leaves the arm.) Dawn Simmons is wonderfully mechanical as the doll and
touching as the woman who just wants to race cars.
Amanda Spinella is a lovely ballerina doll
who, when she can speak candidly, reveals the residual pain and suffering
dancers face off stage. Molly Kimmerling, too, explores the woman beneath the
baby doll voice. Watching the dolls face reality is a crackerjack idea but it
feels like a first scene, rather than a completed work. New plays are often
works in progress. Here’s hoping NER can expand EEP!
