Essential Self-Defense

The machine with no off switch

By Colin Asher

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Don't go the Gurnet Theatre Project's production of Essential Self-Defense if you want to see a play. Go if you want to be in a play.

Director Brian C. Fahey and assistant director Susie Schutt have chosen a complex, frenetic composition for their first project together: A play with so many elements, played so close in so small a space, that the audience is drawn ineluctably into the action.

"The fight scenes are really close; in the bar scenes, you feel like you're in a bar," Schutt says.

The play, written by Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Rapp, is comedy and commentary. It has something to say about modernity, paranoia and the promotion of fear as a means of social control—it's not happy subject material and the characters are neither happy nor charming. The levity in the play is derived from the interactions of two characters "that are very socially awkward and extreme in their neuroses," Fahey says. "That's the comedy."

It's a montage of incongruous personalities: a reclusive paranoid, an anxiety-disordered publisher, a punk librarian, a bourbon swilling butcher and a Russian janitor-cum-poet. Rachael Hunt, who plays Sorrel Haze—a punk librarian who spends most of her stage time shimmying about in stilettos high enough to secure railroad ties—says the quality of the writing and theme of the play pulls it together and makes it understandable. "It's about something everyone can relate to. It's about the overarching fear of a post-9.11 world," she says. "And it works because it's a really well-written play."

Much of the dialogue is a long series of polemics, elucidating the world view of Yul Carroll, the male lead played by a somatically unsettled Adam Henry Garcia, and timid rejoinders from co-lead Chelsea Cipolla as Sadie Day, the shaking leaf of the play. It doesn't sound pleasant to watch, but it is. There's no way to remain somber when Carroll and Day trade lines like: "They're part of the machine." "What machine?" "The machine with no off switch." Or when Carroll insists, "Talent is a fallacy created by gym teachers and Top 40 radio drones."

Place that dialogue into a karaoke bar that only allows original compositions, backs all singers with a live band and doesn't allow anyone to leave without performing, or a subterranean hovel where rats are fended off with a xylophone, and you've either got brilliant comedy or pointless literary immodesty. The play, thankfully, comes down on the side of the former.

All these elements make Essential Self-Defense "edgy in a way I've never seen in live theater," Schutt says. And the number of elements involved—the live band, the many, many set changes, the fight scenes—make it "the most ambitious we've gotten as a company," Fahey says. "I'm excited to see how people react to it because it is so out there."

ESSENTIAL SELF-DEFENSE

BY ADAM RAPP

PRESENTED BY GURNET THEATRE PROJECT

RUNS UNTIL SATURDAY 6.28.08

PLAZA BLACK BOX AT THE BOSTON CENTER FOR THE ARTS

539 TREMONT ST., SOUTH END, BOSTON

617.426.5000

9PM/21+/$5

BCAONLINE.ORG

GURNETTHEATRE.COM