Love & Sin: A Solo Experience
at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, through July 7
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The women in “Love” have all been on the Chicago scene for about 15 years, and their experience is apparent. The pieces feel as though they’ve been distilled to their essence, and the performers barely have to raise their voices to keep an audience rapt. In What Abandon Meant, Magnus’s seven-part opening meditation on love and discomfort, she enters the space with an enormous black futon rolled up on her back, staggering under its weight. She dumps it unceremoniously on the floor, then falls backward onto it as though desperate for comfort. But immediately she scrambles off it, grunting and squirming, her entire body and psyche one annoying itch. She repeats this ritual twice, and by the time she’s done it’s perfectly clear that the futon is a metaphor for love.
Then she begins to explain her “private little trick” for keeping men “intrigued”: she grabs them by their feet and drags them around the room. “I give them a great ride,” she says, “whipping them around, sharp corners and momentous arcs. It’s the best ride, once they really give in to it.” But soon they begin to feel rug burn against their backs, which plunges them into agony, she says, and once she’s sure the burn is “deep enough” she lets them go. The men try to comfort themselves, but the burns “are in that one place you can’t reach yourself,” and eventually scars form there–the spot where, Magnus explains, men once had their wings.
After Trykv’s far-flung fable, Lusia Strus’s straightforward, purely autobiographical It Ain’t No Fairy Tale shines. She opens by explaining that she’s about to get married and wonders if love can last a lifetime. The cynics among us might feel compelled to run screaming from such a potentially saccharine premise, but Strus keeps things richly human by laying out the irreconcilable contradictions of her impending nuptials. Love is like a bubble that delights a child but stains an adult’s $3,000 Vera Wang dress. Love is like a fairy tale, full of shiny princesses and bloodied peasants. Sixty-eight percent of marriages end in divorce within eight years, yet she cherishes her unrivaled collection of bridal magazines.
Belknap gave the first weekend its most harrowing moments, detailing how he abandoned his wife and child for a shot at Hollywood stardom in his monologue on pride, then chronicling a nightmarish journey into addiction for gluttony. Magnus brought the evening to a close with his take on lust, set in a smelting factory, in which he stares transfixed at a sexy woman, barely noticing the vicious industrial accidents that slaughter workers around him. As usual, Magnus’s writing explodes with adventurous wordplay and riveting imagery. His one-sentence description of a woman’s naked body may pack more erotic punch than all of D.H. Lawrence and Erica Jong combined.
