"Weightless," a darkly absurd play at Providence's Perishable Theatre by Australian playwright Christine Evans MFA'02 GS explores family, fear and cultural attitudes towards plastic surgery, gender and sexuality through surrealist satire.
Set in a penthouse 70 floors above street level, "Weightless" focuses on Lillian, a plastic surgeon who never leaves her apartment and the small band of family members and employees with whom she has isolated herself from the world. Lillian is obsessed with artificial perfection in the lives and bodies of those around her.
She commands her lover and live-in nurse, Marion (Sara Betnel) to regularly drug her son, Seth (Matt Bauman '10) in order to suppress his violent outbursts. Even more disturbingly, Lillian performs cruel surgical procedures on her maid, Arrende (Luis Astudillo), whom she has stripped of her legal documents, female genitalia and ability to feel gravity.
While Lillian uses her mind, medication and scalpel to control Seth, Marion and Arrende, she neglects her husband Horace (Richard Noble), who is desperate for attention and affection. At the beginning of the play, he has breasts and appears to be turning into a woman, and by the end, Horace sprouts feathers and clucks like a chicken, indicative of his inability to stand up to his manipulative wife.
To add another dimension of the surreal, as the relationships between the characters crumble, so does the skyscraper in which they have sequestered themselves. The set, mostly constructed of grey plastic panels layered over internally lit wooden frames, periodically splits along a jagged line running through the center of the stage. This happens at moments of high tension and eventually serves as the force that pulls Lillian and Horace out of their self-imposed seclusion.
With another cast, "Weightless" might seem gratuitously bizarre. But the astute acting allows the deeper themes to shine through and prevents the play from relying too heavily on the jarring nature of the script. From Melissa Penick's cold, calculating Lillian, to Bauman's eerie and emotionally damaged Seth, to Astudillo's gender-ambiguous Arrende, the cast draws meaning out of a disturbing and abstract plot.
"Weightless" is Evans' fifth full-length play. It will run through Nov. 11 at Perishable Theatre, located at 95 Empire St.
