Welcome to My Rash & Third

2 World Premieres by Wendy Wasserstein
At Theater J until 2/15/2004

Two one acts as one night of theater. Satsfying, sticks to your ribs theater, which leaves you with a happy feeling, but not much else.

'Welcome to My Rash' follows Flora, an obscure writer, who has found herself with numb feet and an inability to move her upper lip. She meets a doctor, who is her biggest fan EVER, and suggests a course of treatment, which she embarks on. Pumped full of Demerol, she hallucinates about Psyche and hates every minute of the treatment. She wants to stop, and her doctor, perpetually out of town, wants to continue.

She persists, and it eventually works. Somewhat.

That's what I didn't like about this play. The 'somewhat.' I've dealt with being sick before, and with doctors who try to do things and say 'this is what's wrong, this is how you fix it,' and it doesn't work. It's frustrating. It's annoying. I didn't want to remember that again, I guess. I know, I know, theater is not about my personal comfort levels. My opinion.

Wasserstein doesn't villify the doctor. She humanizes him, makes him likeable, but keeps him inaccessible. We don't get insights into each of their lives aside from what they share with each other. They create an unlikely friendship, but they keep it professional, separate.

But there's no real resolution. Where it ends... it ends, but it feels unfinished, so the ending is unsatisfying. Nothing's fixed. Nothing is resolved. Nothing seems to be different, except she got pumped full of Demerol.

'Third' could easily be set in my college. Hyper liberal uberfeminist Shakespeare college professor meets ultra preppy wrestling undergrad. The first half is incredibly funny, and then... the plot happens.

He writes a paper. She thinks he didn't. The audience all knows he did. Why? The character Third (from Woodson Bull III) is set up to be too clean cut, straightforwardly sweet and honest. It's not in his nature to cheat.

As we get inside the crazy professor's head, you see that she's set up her life as her against the Man/world/gov't. Third is kind of an embodiment of that, so she fights against it as best she can. That she's wrong is a big deal for everyone else.

There's a lot of meat here. Apparently, Wasserstein has acknowledged that she wants to make it into a two act. It very easily could be. But the characters are broad sketches, stereotypes. They need to be more human than they are.

Sweet, funny. No life lessons. No big impacts. Stomach full of candy. It was expensive, you enjoyed it, and hey, what's more to it than that?