One can faintly resent Shannon Tarbet’s
abilities as an actress. It seems indefinably improper that someone
should be so skilled at delivering such a nuanced performance at such a
relatively young age (she is 22) and without university or
conservatoire training. Of course, director Christopher Haydon has a
keen eye for the minutiae of a performance, but nevertheless, for
Tarbet to take such direction so naturally, so early, makes her almost
offensively good.
As the first play in the Gate’s “Who Does She Think She Is?” programme
of female-centred meditations on identity, Adam Rapp’s
all-but-monologue (a second character appears for five or so of the 75
minutes) fits the template of the season as well as that of the
playwright’s preferred
modus operandi.
As often with Rapp, a protagonist’s trip to New York symbolises the
possibility of escape from their stultifying everyday, but a
possibility seldom if ever realised. In the case of 16-year-old
Bernadette, bunking off from her New England school, she fails to find
her boyfriend or tell him that she is pregnant, has a sordid, empty
sexual encounter with an older man, and finds less transcendence in the
city than in contemplation of her imminent school production of Genet’s
The Maids.
The story is told from Bernadette’s journal, and Tarbet begins perched
on a stool, obviously (or so it seems) reading: she is spot on with the
artificial cadence patterns and phrase breaks and those strange,
unexpected tics of response when you encounter an unremembered twist in
what you’ve written. About a third of the way in, she jettisons the
book prop (whose pages she has “accidentally” let us see, so that we
know its content is handwritten and doodle-encrusted rather than
consisting of pages of the printed script pasted in) as the character
gives herself over more to direct memory.
As with the early monologue work of Conor McPherson such as
Rum And Vodka, the modest heft of
the play comes from the relationship between the events recounted and
the ostensibly unfussy, low-key portrait of the narrator. In this
respect Tarbet is all but flawless: she even has the precision, when
Bernadette is hamming up passages of Genet, to get her English-actorly
accent wrong in plausibly American ways. This undistinguished
rite-of-passage story is given point and purpose by the meticulous
portrayal of not just the protagonist’s experiences, but the
insecurities of a personality still in formation: of who she thinks she
is, but also who she really is.
Written for the Financial
Times.