Every single one of the five Betties—three femmes, one butch lesbian, one gender-queer, all hilarious in the Shotgun Players production “Collective Rage”—has serious personal issues.
Betty 1 (Nicole Odell), a pretty, 1950s-style housewife in a pink-and-white outfit and a headband, frantically vacuuming a single spot when we first meet her, hates her bland, boring husband.
Petite, anxiety-ridden and socially inappropriate Betty 2 (Atosa Babaoff) is lonely, friendless.
Betty 3 (linda maria girón, sparkling in sequins and perpetually tossing around a long black mane), in a narcissistic bubble of her own making, is reinventing herself as a diva. “I am the voice of my generation,” she proclaims.
Betty 4 (Raisa Donato) is the butch dyke, obsessed with fixing her truck and, it seems, hopelessly in love with Betty 3.
Betty 5 (Skyler Cooper), masculine-presenting and easy-going, owns a gym and has low expectations about life.
All five Betties converge when Betty 3 decides to stage a wildly misconceived play, which she imagines that she herself has “devised.” The play is actually the “Pyramus and Thisby” play-within-a-play scene from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which, of course, none of the Betties realizes, and therefore all of the Betties wildly mispronounce the characters’ names in a variety of ways (“Penis and Thursday,” decides Betty 3).
With Betty 3 as playwright, director, casting director and both leads, the group is all in on auditioning for Moon, Wall, Lion and Prologue. This, they agree in elevated tones, is truly “The Thea-Tah!”
With the bulk of the 90-minute show focusing on the spoof of hopeless amateurs creating a play (which somehow always works as a theatrical device), brilliant comedic playwright Jen Silverman has the opportunity to add a bit of metatheatricality to what is already a subversively clever play about five women struggling to find meaning, and love, in their lives.
And it does indeed take a brilliant playwright to make audiences care about, even identify with, at least one of five characters, while also laughing nearly nonstop at the speedy, stylized dialogue that expresses the characters’ deepest truths.
There’s a theater-of-the-absurd feeling about it all, albeit updated for the 21st century with lots of lesbian humor: Betty 3 waxes eloquent about her sex life, Betty 2 becomes preoccupied with her “pussy,” Betty 1 discovers her own repressed anger and more. And when Betty 2 confides in a hand-puppet—actually, it’s just her own hand—it’s equally parts funny and agonizing.
It would be easy for a play like this to go astray, because the humor is so irresistible (think “Saturday Night Live” sketch on steroids), but director Becca Wolff and the excellent cast have the timing, the brisk stage movement and the characters’ deepest yearnings—the kind we normally keep to ourselves– all within their grasp.
Shotgun Players’ “Collective Rage” continues through Aug. 24 at Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. Tickets are $23-$38 at shotgunplayers.org.
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