Be Aggressive
Annie Weisman’s deliciously dark, sassy comedy about teenage girls on the road at first seems to have little in common with such classics of doomed feminism as Thelma & Louise. But beneath the play’s firecracker dialogue and somewhat shopworn satire of west-coast suburban ennui is a relentlessly truthful portrait of how teenage girls work the system–and each other–to gain a sense of self. Moreover, Weisman never succumbs to the seemingly irresistible temptation to punish her rebellious characters with rape, disfigurement, or death.
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Death happens, but it happens even before the play opens. The mother of one of Weisman’s protagonists, Laura, has died in a hit-and-run accident. When we meet Laura herself, after seeing a gaggle of her fellow cheerleaders gossiping about her mother’s demise, she’s trying to prepare her younger sister, Hannah, for the funeral. “It will be like a pep rally but quieter,” she says as she pulls a brush through Hannah’s hair. Laura’s plans to return to her high school routine–which includes a job at the local smoothie palace as well as cheerleading–are upended by her father, Phil, who insists that she take on the shopping, cooking, and other support-staff functions of the household. But we get an insight into his grief when he and the girls are sorting through a pile of their mother’s clothes and he quickly shoves a black teddy into the pocket of his khakis.
Leslie, bitter about her outsider status, blames her mother, Judy, who won a settlement as a tobacco-company whistle-blower. Seeking attention, Leslie coaxes Laura into her harebrained plan to run away. But when her desperate bravado runs up against Laura’s deeper quest–to reconnect with her mother and figure out how to be a daughter, sister, and woman without her–Leslie blinks. Not being her mother isn’t enough to carry Leslie into a different life. Laura, devoid of Leslie’s easy cynicism, is the one who comes out ahead on their road to nowhere.
