Review of ``Imagining Brad''
The following review of ``Imagining Brad''
appeared in the 26 Feb 90 New Yorker magazine on page 99
under the title ``Worlds Apart''.
[This title, I believe, referred to the great difference between the
two plays being reviewed by the same writer.
Only the first half of the review, dealing with ``Imagining Brad'',
is given here.]
Melissa was 13 at the time.
[Thanks to Jason Jones for pointing out the existence and location
of this review!]
``Imagining Brad,''
which the Circle Rep is producing at the Players Theatre,
is a perfectly hateful play, by Peter Hedges,
that offers as an image of the perfect husband
a virtually blind man with no arms or legs and very little hair,
a not very nice skin condition, cauliflower ears,
and hideous wartlike bumps where his elbows should be.
Mr. Hedges' notion is that since men are a bad lot
and women have such a tough time of it,
a girl is really best off
married to him who lacks the usual number of limbs
to hit her and kick her with.
This in itself might not be so offensive were Mr. Hedges
merely stating his views
or channelling them into the punch line to a joke,
but ``Imagining Brad'' requires two playlets
and an hour and twenty minutes to get to its point,
during which time one is trapped in the Players,
unable to leave, because there's no intermission.
The first playlet, entitled ``The Valerie of Now,''
consists of Melissa Joan Hart doing a spiel
as a twelve-year-old girl
coming to terms with her first menstrual period.
The title playlet, which follows,
consists of a series of conversations between Valerie
now grown up and smugly portrayed by Erin Cressida Wilson
-- the program identifies her only as Brad's Wife (get it?) --
and a stock Nashville housewife (Sharon Ernster).
Both women claim to be happily married,
and Mr. Hedges' method consists
in the gradual revelation of Brad's condition
and the subsequent revelation
that the other woman is a battered wife.
Why the first playlet at all?
Why share with us the anxious hopes and joys and fears
of girl-becoming-woman?
Presumably, to add to the cruel irony in store for us
when we learn what happened right after
that poignant little scene:
how Valerie's father chose the occasion of her twelfth birthday
to embark on a long career of sexual and physical abuse,
which explains why she is quite contented living
with a lump of foul deformity like Brad.
Few things in a theatre, in my experience,
are more embarrassing than the spectacle of
a pretentious male writer waxing meaningful
on the subject of menstruation.
``Imagining Brad,'' which was directed by Joe Mantello,
goes beyond mere discomfiture.
It made my two companions (one male, one female)
so angry they wanted to burn down the theatre.
(The play, they said, changed their perception of nothing
except government subsidy of the arts.)
What makes ``Imagining Brad'' so creepy
is the play's suggestion that men should be reduced to helpless,
dependent appreciators of their wives,
because that is what a woman wants:
``Emasculating Brad'' would be more to the point.
-- Mimi Kramer
Any comments mail me at eric@ezz.u-net.com
Eric Last 14th January 1996
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