How Not to Plan a Polyamorous Vacation. "Polylogues" play reviewed in NY Times. And more poly in the media.

● Fodor's Travel is a mainstream middleclass travel-guide mag ("18 Reasons Why Big Cruise Ships Are Better Than Smaller Boats") that has served the bourgeoisie since our grandparents' days — says my wife Sparkle Moose who, in her youth, bicycled across France with a backpack non-Fodor's style and, with a girlfriend, rode a night train packed with drunken workers through communist Poland's coal country, kicking away drunks trying to climb into their upper berth. 

So either Fodor's is changing or the bourgeoisie is changing when Fodor's publishes this: How Not to Plan a Polyamorous Vacation. (Sept. 13)

It’s tough enough to plan a vacation with another couple. Here’s what happened when we did with our boyfriend and girlfriend—and how we’ll (maybe) do it better in the future.

Sandra Seitamaa / Unsplash 

By Mariah Douglas  

...We’re polyamorous and they’d been our primary relationship for about six months. I was bleary and exhausted from the drama when I abruptly awoke. Something was in our house. “Paul, wake up!” I hissed. “Paul! There’s something in the house.” We were both leaning over the balcony of the upstairs loft bedroom, squinting into the dark, when The Something flew at my head. It seemed a fitting conclusion to a truly implosive vacation: dive-bombed by a vengeful bat in the middle of the COVID panic.

The bat — which met an untimely demise at the business end of a badminton racket — symbolized a trip beset by group travel pitfalls. I don’t know if poly travel routinely includes these complications. ... But I do know that, if we do try it again, we’re much better prepared for the potential hazards.

Initially, this trip was planned as a beach frolic to Portugal. The other couple, let’s call them John and Cathy, told us they were so excited to go. ... [But when covid hit] we had to scale way, way back. This is how we shifted from Portuguese beach to West Virginian off-season ski cabin.

But we could still do a week together! And it would be so much fun! We found a place and sent it to them for approval. But then they weren’t sure about kenneling their dogs.... So we found a [different] dog-friendly place. Surely now all would be smooth sailing. Except, wait – right before the trip, Cathy couldn’t get a whole week off from work. So John and Cathy would come for four days. Um, okay. No, the four days wouldn’t be possible either. It would be three, they announced. No, two. They’d come for a weekend, arriving late Saturday and leaving early Monday.

Paul and I were confused, to put it mildly. ... Gaslighting is real, friends. Keep easily accessible documentation of your trip, including who’s paying for what (more on that in a bit). If you’re traveling with someone and they start blowing up the plans without regard, it’s probably time to rethink the trip.

[Lesson:] No Matter How Much You Like Someone, Everyone Needs a Financial Stake

This trip was our idea, so we did the legwork and we put down the money. ... Paul and I had brought a bunch of alcohol, groceries, citronella candles for the deck, sunscreen – you get the idea. John and Cathy brought a bottle of wine because, as they put it, they weren’t staying very long. ...

[Lesson:] Everyone Also Needs to Have (and Perform) House Tasks

...In the future, I’m not traveling without a clear expectation (and maybe a chore chart) delineating who is doing what and when it’s getting done. ...

[Lesson:] Set Reasonable Expectations—Including Respect

This last one? Totally on us. We didn’t see warning signs for what they were and clung to our belief that this trip would be a romantic escape, just as we envisioned it. We needed to recognize that our partners had trouble committing to plans and often failed to communicate. ...

Should we do this again, we’ll do it differently: putting everything in writing, checking in frequently, setting up a damn Venmo schedule. But we’ll also go into it with fewer puffy pink clouds in our eyes about both people and places. ...

What's interesting here is that their polyness is just treated as background; the article is about smart vacation planning with friends. The magazine could have cut the poly references and the story would have worked fine. But look at that title.

● The New York Times reviews, favorably, a new one-person play that just opened: In ‘Polylogues,’ Dispatches From Non-Monogamy (Sept. 22)

Xandra Nur Clark in the solo show “Polylogues.”

By Laura Collins-Hughes

...Written and performed by [Xandra Nur] Clark, and presented by the company Colt Coeur at Here [off-off-Broadway in Manhattan], “Polylogues” is a collection of monologues taken from Clark’s interviews with a wide range of people — some queer, some straight — who have practiced polyamory or, in a couple of cases, have parents who do.

Like Trudy, who recalls for Clark the time she casually mentioned her father’s girlfriend in front of a friend’s dad, then had to correct his assumption that her parents had split up.

“And I’m like: ‘No, no, no! They’re polyamorous!’” she says. “And then he looked at me funny. And I’m like, “Polyamorous, as in ‘more than one love.’”

There is plenty of talk of sex in “Polylogues,” but love is the tender element that flows through these often self-scrutinizing monologues. A thoughtful, layered, smirk-free show about people constructing their intimate lives outside socially accepted bounds, it makes a humanizing, live-and-let-live case for consensual, ethical non-monogamy.

“Non-monogamy interacting with male privilege, or interacting with capitalism, can, like produce some really, like, frightening dynamics,” says K, an interviewee full of regret for having once pushed an open relationship on a girlfriend, but endearingly happy with a new girlfriend and a series of other, overlapping partners.

...Clark performs the show wearing earbuds, listening to recordings of her interviewees as she speaks their words. A note in the script describes her as being “more like a medium than an actor, channeling real people into the room.” ... Without projections of the characters’ pseudonymous names...we would not be able to distinguish between them, or recognize individuals when they reappear. ... 

“Polylogues” is a curious, compassionate portal into a topic we most often see treated with prurience.

It runs through October 9.

● From Vice, How the Bay Area’s Polyamorous Relationships Shifted During the Pandemic, with a photo essay (Sept. 13)

Eric Ruby spent the summer photographing the dyads, triads, and more that surround him, focusing on all the ways COVID-19 has changed poly life.

Eric Ruby photos

By River Black

I’m always hungry to glimpse the inner workings of love and to see real-life examples of people living in line with their hearts and values, especially in polyamory, where there are few established road maps. I was surprised when one of my most “out” polyamorous friends didn’t want to be photographed by my partner Eric Ruby with her long-term or more recent partners. With one, they were drifting apart as lovers, even though they were still “family”; with the other, she was on the cusp of transitioning the relationship toward something less romantic. ...

Another person I regarded as solidly poly, seeing them out at parties with their multiple lovers also in attendance, said they were reevaluating in light of reconnecting with a longtime friend across the country, and realizing there was more there. ... And yet, not reconsidering entirely—even as this friendship-turned-romance evolves in intimacy, they are planning to read Polysecure together, Jessica Fern’s 2020 book about how to create securely attached poly relationships. Surprising me yet again is the elasticity of how people continually redefine their relationship to being polyamorous and what that looks like for them.

The people most excited to be photographed were the larger groups; they really wanted to be represented and had found comfort and stability within their configurations. “We have matching All Love tattoos. It was really nice during the pandemic to live with multiple people—otherwise, I think I would have gone crazy,” said a member of a four-person polycule who have lived together for 10 years, with three relationships between them. The largest group excitedly showed us a visualization of their polycule, totaling 14 people, with lines representing marriages, divorces, lovers, platonic friendships, and “friendship plus.” Their relationship map was an explanatory tool for friends, new lovers, and, occasionally, even themselves.

A dyad texted later: “Relationships are a creative process in which, every day, people get to imagine how they want to be together. We enjoy that there are no givens or rules to ‘us.’ Because of this we are adaptable and we grow.” ...

Ultimately, it’s hard to tell which changes in people’s polyamorous love lives can be attributed to the pandemic and its pressures and which to the normal shifting of already-fluid relationships. For some, these past 18 months have clarified priorities, resulting in new flowerings and endings both painful and peaceful; for others, they’ve had a wide net to catch and hold them and a community in which to weather the storm.

● More covid-and-poly: Keep Them Coming: Polyamory in the pandemic in the alt-weekly KC Pitch, "Kansas City's independent source for news and culture" since 1980 (Sept. 20).

By Kristen Thomas

...Were polycules—that is, a group of people connected through a consensually non-monogamous relationship—stable or fragile because of all the time together during quarantine? Had they adjusted and found their footing? Are they dating safely or causing the virus to spread? I had conversations with some poly individuals to find answers. 

Turns out, the pandemic has given many folks a chance to explore poly relationships while being surprisingly safe. ...

● In the Poly 101 department, a sociologist explains the types of chemical bonds that create polycules: sexual, romantic, platonic, family-like, friendshippy.... What Is A Polycule? Understanding Polyamory Relationship Structures (MindBodyGreen, Sept. 20)

By Kesiena Boom

..."An unavoidable aspect of nonmonogamy is that people are engaging in a system of relationships that all impact one another," says Anna Dow, LCSW, a therapist who specializes in consensual nonmonogamy and practices it herself. "Having shared language for that system can add to some people's senses of security and belonging while also offering practical information about how their own relationship dynamics may impact other people."

...Navigating intimate relationships with more than one person means that it is especially important to be a thoughtful and active listener. Take the time to really understand and respect not just your own boundaries but everyone else's in the polycule.

"You may have heard that the golden rule is to treat others as you want to be treated, but somebody got that all wrong. To build healthy relationships what we really must do is treat others as they want to be treated," says Dow. ...

● In Women's Health: Growing Up In The Mormon Church, I Was Deeply Ashamed Of Being Polyamorous And Bisexual (Sept. 10). "One writer shares how she finally embraced her sexuality and came out to her parents." 

By Natalie Fuller

Growing up in the Mormon church, expressing your sexuality—having sexual feelings of any kind—is seen as taboo. ...

I knew even in high school that I was polyamorous and bisexual, even though I didn’t have the words to describe those feelings at the time. I’d make promises I couldn’t keep, like telling my boyfriends I wouldn’t kiss girls. Those relationships never worked out because I couldn’t be honest with myself or them. ...

In my experience, shame is like a sunburn: hot and tender to the touch, but eventually the dead skin starts to slough off. You end up rubbing and picking at it. It's a shedding process, of other people’s beliefs and judgements. It’s uncomfortable. But you shed and shed until your new skin comes through.

I first started picking at my sunburn when my older sister, who had already left the church, started taking me to African dance classes. I felt simultaneously embarrassed and excited looking at myself in the mirror, thrusting my open hips and making wild expressions. As I got older and left the church myself, I started collecting experiences that made me feel more like myself.

There was the freedom and childlike nature of my first skinny dip with friends; it felt like we’d never left the Garden of Eden. Then there was a trip to Maui, where I got my first taste of being with multiple partners at once. I moved to Oregon, and then Colorado, finding like-minded people along the way and building a community that accepted the real me. For the past year, I've been with two loving, long-term partners.

Still, I wasn’t out to everyone, including my parents. ...

●  The difference between polyamory and an open relationship is often deep, and sometimes it's unbridgeable. On HuffPost, My Lover’s Girlfriend Asked Him To Dump Me. Here’s What I Learned When He Did. (Sept. 17)

By Keyanah Nurse

“I really like you, but my partner is struggling with us being lovers. I’m caught between a rock and a hard place,” his message read. “Is friendship still possible for us?” 

Although I was disappointed, I wasn’t surprised. The signs were there, even from the first time I met him two years ago... [when] as he talked about his long-distance partner and I discussed my two local partners, I realized that our different approaches within the umbrella of ethical non-monogamy were incompatible.

My polyamory centered fully fledged relationships with multiple partners at the same time. I could introduce all my partners to my mom, go on vacation with any of them, post about them on my social media or have sleepovers. His open relationship, on the other hand, allowed only for short-term sexual and romantic connections that ended whenever his primary partner was in town. Not all ethical non-monogamy is created alike, I realized. The chasm between my polyamory and his open relationship felt too dangerous to traverse.

The author with her two partners
on New Year’s Eve 2020

...He admired my boldness as a Black polyamorous woman, often remarking how he wished for a similar freedom to build concurrent romantic relationships.

-----------------------

...When he asked to date again, I had doubts. But two years had passed. Within that time, his long-distance partner moved back to our city. They were also defining themselves as polyamorous, a change from the form of ethical non-monogamy he described when I first met him.

...Did our conversations about my polyamory sway him? As I explained to him over the years, the public visibility of both of my partnerships was central to my ethics and my politics. Having suffered in the past the indignity of being a “secondary” partner, I refused to reproduce an emotional hierarchy with my own partners.

-----------------------

...I beamed at his compliment as we sipped the whiskey I brought to his place. The heat radiating off our bodies pulsed in anticipation of answering a two-year question in the making. The next few hours were a mix of laughter, passion and indulgence. I always enjoyed our easy yet biting banter. As lovers, that banter gave way to a new intimacy. The answer to the question of us seemed to be: potential. What would happen next? Would there be an “us”? 

...When I invited him to spend the night at my place, he explained that it was not yet something he was ready for since his partner was now in the same city. I bristled at the restriction. 

...His partner sent a series of long messages to a group chat we made a few weeks prior. She apologized for appearing finicky and controlling. But ultimately she was uncomfortable with my friend developing independent relationships while she was in the same city. 

“I really thought things had changed and that she would be OK with dating separately,” he explained a few days later. “I’m sorry if I wasted your time.” 

I had been “vetoed.” ...

Read on. There's a twist.

Laura Boyle

● The number of books about polyamory is growing to the point where I no longer buy all the new ones — my collection now fills a five-foot bookshelf and this is getting expensive — but I just ordered a new one because of its author: Laura Boyle of the Ready For Polyamory podcast and blog. It's titled Ready for Polyamory: A Pragmatic Guide to Consensual Non-Monogamy. (It hasn't shipped yet, but she posts that it should go out by October 1.)

She says the book is "a selection of practical thoughts rooted in theory to get you over humps of difficulty in polyamorous relationships and identify what you want out of new ones, while simultaneously a book thorough enough that if you give it to someone new to this, they have a strong foundation to build on. I'm proud to say I think I achieved that."

From its Amazon page:

...With more than half the book dedicated to important conversations to have at potential pain points in relationships to avoid strife and have smoother sailing in your polycules, we address STIs, fluid bonding, jealousy, compersion, communication styles, compatibility on multiple fronts, and more. The idea of building your relationships with intention and not just because “That’s what comes next” is at the center of all the theory woven into the practical information contained here.

●  Do you live in Somerville, Mass.? Know anyone who does? Area grad student Diane Duan seeks to interview poly Somerville residents for a study on effects, if any, of the city's 14-month-old multi-domestic partnership ordinance. Email diane_duan (at) williamjames.edu.

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Friday Polynews Roundup — Activists on the Tamron Hall show, two poly plays, poly-mono crises, my mission, and more

Once again, it's Friday Polynews Roundup!  — for January 24, 2020.

● Polyfolks do the Tamron Hall show. Yesterday five of our fine representatives went on the new Tamron Hall daytime TV talk show, which is syndicated to stations by ABC/Disney and reportedly has 1.3 million viewers daily. Kevin and Antoinette Patterson and their polycule partners Chrissy Holman and Pace, plus open-relationship psychologist Dr. Justin Clardy, held forth for about 11 minutes during the second half of the one-hour show.

Many of you, alerted beforehand by Chrissy's social campaign, watched and then swarmed into the show's Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter with supportive comments and explanations.

Antoinette and Kevin Patterson. "Ignore that tacky backdrop," writes co-guest Chrissy
Holman. "We said polyamory despite what the media would have you think."

 
So far the show's website has only 1½ minutes of the video up (and it's not embeddable here as best I can tell). But a friendly person got low-res video of the whole thing by pointing her phone at the TV for the three segments between ads. At that link: Left, Antoinette and Kevin start off alone. Bottom right, Justin Clardy came next. Top right, all four partners close it out. Too bad they got so little time as a group of four.

Posts Chrissy,

Our day was bananas. Talking to a mostly non-sympathetic audience of over one million people about polyamory wasn't an easy task, but we did it. Live. That took a lot - make no mistake. I am drained and I'm sure my Phillycule is, too.

The stars getting prepped to go on.

I am proud of us. We did our best with what they gave us, which wasn't much, but we made lemonade and will continue to do so. Hopefully this is a catalyst for many future conversations. Let's normalize and destigmatize non-monogamy. It's clear given their questions and assumptions that there's much work to be done. I'm here for it.

My personal mission is simple - make polyamory inclusive, center folks at the margins, and make polyamory as BORING as possible. My dream is to pick up a book or see a movie where there are polyam folks of all races, genders, abilities, and orientations... BUT... it's a non issue. No one even bats an eye. It becomes a non-issue."

...There's so much love and compassion, and this is what we need. I hope others can have the same love and support we're so blessed to have."

BTW — Come meet Kevin in person in two weeks at Loving More's Poly Living convention in Philadelphia!  He's keynoting the con on Friday night. See you there.



● In Dan Savage's "Savage Love letter of the day," a sad and oh-so-typical crisis of a poly-mono couple who married five years ago without discussing and learning of their basic incompatibility on like, maybe, the second date? Much less before getting married? At least there are no kids yet. She Can't Do What He's Asking Her To Do — So What Should She Do? (Jan. 21).

All I want to do is to cheat on my husband of five years, whom I love passionately. My husband is intelligent, goofy, athletic, respectful, adventurous, and intellectually curious. We share the same values, sense of humor, and hobbies. We have great conversations and amazing sex. But I’m always falling for other men, which has never diminished my love for my husband. Crushing on other men is exhausting, thrilling, and miserable. I hate the unavoidable blushing, ear-to-ear smiling, crippling guilt, and occasional panic attack. (Compounding the misery, I can’t giggle with anyone about my crushes since I’m a married lady. I instead repress everything, which feels horrible.) Two years ago, I thought I had a solution: severing ties with all my male friends and acquaintances. This ended badly. ...

My rant: When I got into polyamory-awareness activism 15 years ago, the concept that multi-relationshipping could be successful and joyous was practically unknown. A life mission I privately set for myself was to help make it a cultural norm that when a dating relationship turns serious, the question "Do you want us to be open or closed?" is right up there with things like "Do you ever want to have kids?" Rather than just assuming that of course everybody who's worthwhile always turns monogamous, there's no other way except being a rat, no need to ask.

And not just no asking, no cultural room for telling. Even in the most intimate soul-relationship of your life.

I'm kind of amazed that, as early as 2020, this discussion has gone from culturally unthinkable to a fairly widely known wise thing to do — across much of the Western world and beginning to spread elsewhere (India, Russia, Japan...). Too bad this couple failed to get word that they could and should, you know, talk.


● Two poly-centered plays are making news in California's Bay Area: How to Transcend a Happy Marriage by noted playwright Sarah Ruhl, reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle (Jan. 20) and elsewhere, and PolySHAMory, a solo standup show by Kate Robards, also reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle (Jan. 12) and elsewhere.

Both plays have been going around for two or three years; see my past posts for Transcend and PolySHAMory. From those SF Chronicle reviews,

[How to Transcenda Happy Marriage]   Take all your feelings about matrimony and monogamy, in all their contradictions. ... Maybe you revere the way present-tense love can stretch forward and backward in time while you also chafe at the limitations of giving your whole self to only one person. Maybe you’re curious about what other modes and loves are out there but too afraid to admit it or explore what that means. Maybe all that affection and lust you feel — for your partner, but also friends, co-workers — resist the compartmentalization the world demands.

“How to Transcend a Happy Marriage” acknowledges all those feelings and then, miraculously, stages a kind of ritual that makes them all OK.

In Sarah Ruhl’s play ... orgy becomes sylvan vision quest, which in turn leads to botched animal sacrifice. Everything falls apart. There are cops and protests and scars and fractures and losses, all manner of trauma. But the result is that two heterosexual couples, all best friends, are a little less tethered, a little more truthful with themselves and each other, a little bit more like the family they perhaps always secretly wanted to be. ...

[PolySHAMory]   Kate Robards recounts how a Cinderella story of a wedding devolved into a nightmare of a marriage. She describes the nightmare as her relationship’s particular breed of polyamory, but you can imagine members of the poly community questioning her use of the label. In Robards’ telling, her now ex-husband drives each step of the pair’s decision to start looking for “paramours,” as she fakes enthusiasm in return — sometimes hilariously, her words drying up, no more sound squeaking out — or awkwardly acquiesces.

If polyamory is supposed to come from a superabundance of love, receptivity and openness, Robards incarnates her ex, Josh, as a meathead prone to glossing over pain and complexity with a “Hey, babe.” ...

So is Robards a total poly-basher? Well, no. From an interview with the Chronicle January 7th:

Q: I was wondering if with the word “sham” you had any worries about reinforcing simplistic stereotypes about polyamory.

A: I’ve had a lot of people who are polyamorous come to my show, including friends … and they were like, “We get enough of a hard rap for this, and we don’t need one more person telling a bad story about it.” But I have to remind them that as an artist I have a point that I’m getting to and ideas and questions which are unanswered to me, which I want to explore in the piece, and they get that.

...Anytime you do anything autobiographical, I think you have to tread the line of being respectful to the communities and the people you speak about. … I make sure to use my “I” statements. It’s my personal story. It is authentic and it is autobiographical. I make sure not to delve into the other people’s perceptions, the other characters’. It’s just my point of view. It’s truly a monologue.

● Honeysuckle magazine is a black-culture print and digital quarterly. Now up: Porn and Politics with King Noire and Jet Setting Jasmine: On Being Black and Polyamorous (online Jan. 22). Jasmine and King Noire are "the powerhouse couple behind the award-winning adult entertainment company Royal Fetish Films."

By Keyanah Nurse

Although polyamory is neither new nor revolutionary, the increased buzz around it brings forth a slew of questions around how polyamorous people and communities appear within mainstream media. As others have rightfully highlighted, coverage largely focuses on polyamory’s white middle class practitioners, creating the impression that polyamory simply isn’t for people of color. But even when larger media outlets specifically highlight this issue, their analyses always stop short of simply acknowledging that yes, people of color, and black people particularly, practice polyamory. Such coverage is useful insofar as it provides a platform for the conferences, online communities, and books that have emerged specifically by and for black polyamorous people. However, it still begs the simple question: how does it work? ...

● Metamour Day this year is gonna be a Thing! It's February 28, Valentine's Day times two. And as told here last week, the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF) is throwing its weight behind making this take hold in 2020 after a good start last year.

NCSF says its purpose for Metamour Day is "honoring polyamory's most distinctive relationship," as well as

to foster acceptance and heighten understanding of consensual non-monogamy (“CNM”), strengthen the CNM community, and create awareness of the NCSF mission.

In an effort to broaden the reach and celebration of this holiday, we encourage you to spread the word and host an event for your community. Some of our supporters are hosting parties, others are participating in our greeting card contest (details on the website), and using our hashtag #MetamourDay2020 on social media to promote the occasion. We would love to hear about what you do so we can share in the fun and boost Metamour Day now and into the future.

Eventually, we want to create an archive of information and examples of the fantastic things our constituents do to acknowledge this important relationship. Additionally, if you need any participation from us, we are happy to help. Please let us know if you’re interested by reaching us at metamourday@ncsfreedom.org at your earliest convenience. Please visit our website, https://ncsfreedom.org/metamour-day-2/, for more information.

Used by permission. Click to embiggen.

● And before that comes #PolyamoryWeek, February 9 – 15, though I'm seeing less momentum there so far. Yet people do keep putting up graphics on Instagram....

See you next Friday, or sooner if stuff comes up!

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Reviews come in for 'How to Transcend a Happy Marriage'

The morning after opening night, the New York Times reviewer has a mixed opinion of Sarah Ruhl's new polyamory play How to Transcend a Happy Marriage at the Lincoln Center, the subject of my post yesterday.

Plunging Into Polyamory With ‘How to Transcend a Happy Marriage’

By Ben Brantley

In 1969, two married couples took off their clothes and jumped into one accommodatingly wide bed. Thus did Paul Mazursky’s satirical film “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” claim a little piece of cinematic immortality....

Ah, the clumsiness, the tortured soul-searching, the naïveté of those heady, experimental times. People today of course are far more at ease with their bodies and their vast potential for erotic self-expression. Why, just look at Paul and George and Michael and Jane, the uneasily swinging [sic] spouses of Sarah Ruhl’s “How to Transcend a Happy Marriage”....

And marvel at how little has changed. The evidence of this idea-inebriated, unsteady comedy ... is that when it comes to matters of the heart (and the libido), middle-aged married folks are as scared, curious and confused as ever.

...The opening scene, which finds two sets of married friends discussing the idea of polyamory over wine and cheese, has the chipper blitheness of those comedies of middle-class manners that were once the bread and butter of Broadway. Jane (Robin Weigert), a lawyer, is describing a fascinating new temp in her office to an avid audience of three: Jane’s husband, Michael (Brian Hutchinson), and their best friends, George (Ms. Tomei) and Paul (Omar Metwally).

The temp is called Pip, and it seems she not only shares her bed with the two men with whom she lives but also personally kills the animals she eats. ... They decide that they must meet this exotic creature and her companions. A New Year’s Eve gathering is arranged, chez Jane and Michael. “And our lives would change forever,” says George (short for Georgia)....

[Pip and her partners] show up bearing hash brownies, sanctimonious life philosophies and a load of multidirectional sex appeal. After some literate but lubricious conversation about Pythagorean triangles and animal sacrifice, Pip performs a double-entendre karaoke version of “She’ll Be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain.”

The song turns out to be the foreplay for a polymorphous orgy in which identities melt and merge. And just before the first act ends, who should burst in on these intertwined, grown-up bodies but Jane and Michael’s understandably outraged teenage daughter, Jenna (Naian González Norvind).

So far, so formulaic, right? But what follows does not adhere to the rules of standard-issue sex comedies. The walls of Mr. Zinn’s set disappear, for one thing. Then there’s that plot turn that hinges on an Ovidian metamorphosis (appropriately, as George teaches Latin). Or maybe not, given that the people involved were under the influence of psychedelic mushroom tea as well as hashish.

...But the elements never quite coalesce into a single fluid stream of thought or story.... Despite its portrayal of uncommon events, “How to Transcend a Happy Marriage” remains stuck in the conjectural realm of its opening scene, where George and Paul and Jane and Michael are still just trying on daring ideas on for size.

Read the whole review (online March 20; in print March 21 [on the front page of the paper's Section C, New York edition]).


● In this morning's Newsday:

Play questions monogamy

By Linda Winer

What looks alarmingly like a dead, skinned goat hangs upside down from a hook at the start of Sarah Ruhl’s “How to Transcend a Happy Marriage.” A willowy woman enters, seems to whisper something to the head of the goat, then tenderly unhooks it and carries it away.

...I admit I’ve have been slow to warm to the prolific [playwright Sarah] Ruhl, twice a Pulitzer finalist and a MacArthur fellow.... But this new play is a subversive enchantment. It is part absurd domestic serio-comedy, part erotic magic realism, unflinching about taboos and about questioning that, just maybe, monogamy isn’t enough.

...Directed without sensationalism but with intrepid good humor by Rebecca Taichman (“Indecent”), the inevitable bacchanalian reveries ensue. But so does heady talk about Pythagorean triangles, the immortality of a Bach minuet, grief, architecture and why women are expected to lose their “animal nature” after childbirth.

But why, why, does the production have to bring a non-domesticated animal, a live dove, onto the stage for the final scene? Everything pales next to the discomfort of a live creature. For a play that toys with ideals of “radical honesty,” either everything else has to be real or, better yet, the bird should be fake.

The whole review (online March 20, in print March 21.)


● Deadline calls it "trippy":

Marisa Tomei Is Dazzled (And Confused) In ‘How To Transcend A Happy Marriage’

By Jeremy Gerard

...Ruhl has one of the liveliest intellects of any playwright today. Her plays ... thrum with ideas and careen between realism and non-realism in a way that I think only finds a parallel in the best work of Christopher Durang. As with Durang, when everything aligns, the work provokes a kind of euphoria.... And when everything doesn’t? What’s the sound of ideas spinning off into the ether?

...Pip is exceptionally beautiful and she’s polyamorous, Jane reports, the word tripping off her tongue as though it is far more common than I’ve noticed. She lives with two men who love her – apparently all the time, as lately she has been coming to work exhausted.

...Not unexpectedly, Pip, Freddie and David upend their hosts’ notions of normalcy, mainly regarding love and sex.... George turns out to be the true seeker in the group, and most of Act II is taken up with the places – oh, the places – Pip takes her, including, at one point, jail, the aftermath of a deer hunt gone all wrong.

...How To Transcend A Happy Marriage reads better than it plays in this production – the fine work of fine actors notwithstanding. The takeaway is more head-scratching than transcendent, as evanescent as Pip herself proves to be.

The whole review (March 20).


● At Vulture.com, Jesse Green enjoys showing how he wields a deft knife:

Typically, Sarah Ruhl’s plays sound like your smartest friend stoned. They unfurl in tendrils of dialogue that are both organic and perseverant, fantastic and philosophical. Because the plots are not especially logical, the characters often seem freaked out by the situations they face and the new thoughts they are hatching. ... The untrammeled play of the imagination as a means of normalizing unfamiliar ideas seems to be her priority, and never has she been as free with her storytelling as in How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, ... Ruhl’s stonedest work yet.

I don’t mean to harsh anyone’s mellow, but that’s not totally a compliment. The demilitarized zone between fanciful and inane is one that’s better left unbreached.

...Pip and David and Freddie, the polyamorists, are presented to the audience, I hope deliberately, as ridiculous caricatures. Pip, with streaks of blue and feathers in her hair, wearing short cut-offs on New Year’s Eve, is a free-spirit cliché; ... David (pronounced Daveed) is a vaguely European poseur spouting unlikely claptrap about Pythagoras, and Freddie is, well, not much of anything except a pretentious stick insect. (Latin, he tells us, is “too beautiful for this world.”)....

Yes, there’s an orgy. Or is there? Though Tomei beautifully pulls off her confused arias of overprivilege and its inchoate longings — she’s the kind of woman whose great embarrassments in life include never having learned Greek — Ruhl does not intend for us to take the story literally. Neither does the production....

Unfortunately this surrealism, however conscious it is as an esthetic choice to support the theme of personality disassociation, undermines the play at every turn. How are we supposed to take seriously its invitations to consider ethical food practices and polyamory when the proponents of those ideas are so absurd and condescending? Nor do we feel like joining the older group in their investigation of these ideas, when they are painted as so neurotic (the women) and shallow (the men).

The method, it turns out, is not as loosey-goosey as it seems. What appear to be discursions and sidetracks in the storytelling are actually (you eventually realize) just further twists of the vise of meaning. The play is littered with symbols Ruhl works very hard to whip into concordance: birds, eggs, children, Latin, meat, music. Even poor Pythagoras is dragged into the polyamory theme; it’s those damned triangles.... The proportion of ideas to people is out-of-whack. As with polyamory, it seems to me, the problem isn’t having too much feeling to share; it’s having too little.

Whole review (March 20).


● Entertainment Weekly:

By Breanna L. Heldman

“I just felt bad for the duck.”

That was one theatergoer’s conclusion about How to Transcend a Happy Marriage during intermission. Still, she and her friend were optimistic that the story would come together in its second half, and they would leave feeling enriched as any theatergoer hopes to. But then, the lights went down the second time and one of the eight characters in the play turned into a bird, so they probably didn’t.

...The literary magazine-like Lincoln Center Theater Review accompanying the show features a number of excerpts and writings on the various ideas discussed in Sarah Ruhl’s play. The introduction ... describes the show as operating “on two levels: on the surface, it is a domestic play, whimsical and titillating, but the issues pulsing beneath the surface are profound — identity, sexuality, and an examination between civilization and wild, human nature at its most fundamental and urgent.”

Unfortunately, the story is rather more bewildering than “profound.” Amid a wealth of terrific, clever, laugh-out-loud dialogue — Ruhl is a MacArthur Genius and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, after all — are moments of total realness and others of supernatural wildness, yet none of it quite clicks into place. ... I gave up trying to understand where Pip ended and an egg-laying bird began in the second act.

...How to Transcend a Happy Marriage is funny and filled with great actors giving impressive, vulnerable performances. But ultimately, the lasting impression is less than the sum of its parts.

Whole review (March 20).


● Variety:

By Marilyn Stasio

There is abundant sex and nudity in Sarah Ruhl’s new play ... along with some brainy conversation about the ethics of animal slaughter. The setting for this experimental piece is exceptionally handsome, and under the sure directorial hand of Rebecca Taichman, a tip-top cast headed by Marisa Tomei performs with brio. Nonetheless, the show is both baffling and boring.

Whole review (March 21).


● The Hollywood Reporter:

By Frank Scheck

First, a confession: I’ve never been to an orgy. But I imagine they probably start out as a great deal of fun before eventually becoming tiresome and exhausting. Such is also the case with the new play by Sarah Ruhl....

...Featuring fast and funny dialogue, the play initially seems to be operating on all cylinders. But the second act, which delves into magical realism, becomes hopelessly murky and confusing.

...Still, the evening is certainly not hard to sit through, thanks especially to its three vital female stars, whose characters register as sexy, smart and strong. Weigert makes the grounded Jane infinitely appealing; Hall vibrantly embodies Pip’s larger-than-life qualities; and Tomei anchors the proceedings with earthy vivacity. Their efforts are nearly, but not quite enough, to transcend the problematical aspects of How to Transcend a Happy Marriage.

Whole review (March 20).


● In contrast to the above, The Wrap's reviewer actually gets the play, or so he thinks:

By Robert Hofler

...When a play begins with a goat, you know you’re in for an evening of heavy lifting. Generally, that’s not a good sign. Two modern dramas, however, show us how engrossing that kind of weighty workout can be....

Equally provocative and enlightening is Sarah Ruhl’s new play, “How to Transcend a Happy Marriage.” That one of the eight characters ends up as a dove and lays three eggs on stage should also deter no theatergoer from seeing [it].

...Ruhl definitely knows how to get a play going in its first few minutes. Jane reveals everything she knows about being polyamorous, which has nothing to do with swinging or swapping partners; and soon the two couples are making plans to invite the polyamorous triad over for drinks one night to learn all about loving and having sex among three people.

The operative word here is not “polyamorous” but rather “triad,” and Ruhl conveniently stacks her play with mathematicians, architects, musicians and a teacher of Latin (of all things). Squares and triangles, as well as couples, can be restrictive, but there is also inspiration to be found in those mathematical confines....

“How to Transcend a Happy Marriage” is two hours with intermission, and it abounds with situations that lead its characters to say the most quotable things, all of which should be experienced live in the theater and not in any critic’s review. They’re that memorable.

...It’s a quibble, but “How to Transcend a Happy Marriage” so abounds with ideas and novel situations that Ruhl’s characters occasionally take a backseat. It may be why Ruhl writes plays and not novels. In the theater, actors can fill in with flesh, blood and emotion what is a mere outline in the script, and here the playwright is blessed with a magnificent cast under the always sensitive direction of Rebecca Taichman.... Even though George’s journey is fantastical, the actress makes us believe and empathize with her every awkward step forward.

Whole review (March 20).

● And more.

Update: Actress Marisa Tomei from the play appeared in The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (online March 31). Discussion of the play starts at 3:45:



Update May 15: And now comes an in-person review from Emily Matlack, one of the trio who do the cool Multiamory Podcast: A Polyamorous Dive into Sarah Ruhl’s New Play, “How to Transcend a Happy Marriage”.

Update June 22: A very promising late review on HuffPost a month after the play closed: On the Culture Front: How to Transcend a Happy Marriage. By Chris Kompanek. I wonder if this play is destined to go on the road?

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Polyamory play opens at Lincoln Center: "How to Transcend a Happy Marriage"

That's Pip in the blue sweater.

Positive polyamory, as a story theme, tonight becomes about as establishment as you can get in the theater world; New York's Lincoln Center calls itself "The world's leading performing arts center" and gets away with it. How to Transcend a Happy Marriage opens there this evening.

The promo blurb:

At a dinner party in the wilds of New Jersey, George (Marisa Tomei) and her husband talk with a fellow married couple about a younger acquaintance — a polyamorous woman (Lena Hall) who also hunts her own meat. Fascinated, they invite this mysterious woman and her two live-in boyfriends to a New Year’s Eve party which alters the course of their lives.

HOW TO TRANSCEND A HAPPY MARRIAGE explores the boundaries of monogamy and the limits of friendship. This new work asks what happens when parents let their wild sides come out of hibernation.

A video-vignette preview (44 seconds):



An interview with the lead actress, at TheaterMania:

Lena Hall Brings Polyamory to Lincoln Center

By Hayley Levitt

...Even more memorable, however, was her [2014 Tony Award] acceptance speech, which ended with the My Little Pony aphorism, "Friendship is magic." In a strange way, that same sentiment captures the essence of Sarah Ruhl's new fantastical play, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, opening tonight at Lincoln Center....

Hall plays Pip, the linchpin of a polyamorous threesome who shakes up the lives of two traditional married couples.... Pip has plenty of quirks, most notably her insistence on [bow]hunting for her own meat. But her free-minded philosophies draw something almost mystical out of her married disciples who have thus far narrowly defined the kinds of love that are available to them in their various relationships.

...If we abide by Hall's calculations, expanding your circle of love and friendship can only make life more magical.

...Lena Hall: “I love the character, I love the ideas that are being talked about, and I felt like it would be fun to play something that was a little bit more closely related to me.... It's more rooted in who I am — you know, except for the polyamory. [laughs] ...I think maybe because of how I was raised by my hippie parents. It's cool to play a character that is so rooted in her own spirituality....

“We did a lot of research on polyamorous couples. We forget that love is not so one-person-based. There's something about physically being in a community of people that are relating to each other that is completely and utterly fulfilling. Romantic love is not all you're looking for. You're actually getting your fill of love from multiple sources. And a lot of people look — at least I looked, to feel loved and completed by a romantic partner only, and that can be very limiting. If you open up your bubble to include other people — and I'm not talking about sexually, I'm just talking about emotionally connecting to people — then you're not flying in the dark. No one has to be alone.

“There is a community out there for anyone and everyone if they want it. There's this focus on the sex aspect of polyamory because that's what everyone is more curious about. But I feel like the polyamorous movement is not all about sex. It's about having a bigger sense of family — a bigger sense of home.”

The whole interview (March 20, 2017).


● More promo material from the theater: pix, interviews, audio with the director — and an interview with the play's writer, Sarah Ruhl. Excerpt:

The final epigraph [at the beginning of the play's script] is the tersest: “Great sluts are made, not born.” It is taken from the 2009 volume The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures, by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy.

Sarah Ruhl

“A friend gave that book to me,” Ruhl said. “He thought I might be interested in it, and I was.” She went on: “I was fascinated by all the rules you need to construct a polyamorous life. There’s constant negotiation.” Ruhl explained that there are many brands of polyamory as defined by The Ethical Slut “including the free-love movements of the turn of the 20th century or of the 1960s.”

And there are many different cultural expressions of it: “For example, there’s a matriarchal society in Mongolia where the women have sex with as many men as they want. And among some of the nomadic groups in Tibet two brothers will share a wife. And, in the Bible, brothers share wives all the time. The difference with polyamory in the U.S. today is that ours is freely chosen. It’s not a part of a wider cultural norm.”

And how does all this relate to How To Transcend a Happy Marriage? “Audiences will soon see,” Ruhl said.

Update next day: A whole raft of reviews were published overnight. The play sounds... surreal.

Update May 5, as the show is about to close: TheaterMania interviews the star and the playwright: Marisa Tomei and Sarah Ruhl On Bringing a New Kind of Love to the Theater.



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Yours Unfaithfully: a rediscovered poly play from 1933 becomes a thing.

A play that wins a stellar review and a Critics Pick from the New York Times is going places. Miles Malleson, an open-marriage advocate and practitioner with his wife, wrote Yours Unfaithfully [sic] in 1933, but it was never produced. Now it's finally onstage. From the modern poly movement's perspective it sounds rather conventional, dated, and uninformed, but this was 1933.

First, from a more historically oriented story in Time Out New York:

Yours Unfaithfully brings a 1930s depiction of polyamory to light

By Sandy MacDonald

In 1933... polyamory was a practice without a label: The term wouldn’t emerge for another half-century. But smart London was atingle with notions of free love, and Malleson... was an avid proselytizer, graciously sharing his spouse with Bertrand Russell, who happened to have a wife of his own. Malleson’s bio, synopsized in the production’s program, suggests a life story considerably more colorful than the tidy marital drama that unfolds onstage.

[We meet] a young, attractive couple at loose ends. As new parents unhappy with the religious orthodoxy espoused by local educators, they’ve started their own school (as the real-life Russells did). The project has sidetracked Stephen, an iconoclastic novelist, and Anne determines that he needs a diversion. What better pick-me-up than their recently widowed friend, Diana?

First, of course, the trio and their physician confidant must talk — and talk and talk — the whole thing over. It takes two months of importuning on Stephen’s part, plus a written permission slip from Anne, to get the ball rolling toward their arrangement’s “climax” in Vienna.

...The script offers a scrupulous examination of two warring impulses: the urge to explore versus the instinct to nurture and protect. Happily, we’re spared the wink-wink prompts of farce, though Malleson does allude to an extremely vulgar adage of the day, sanitized here as “Fresh kiss, fresh courage.” If only he had applied that tenet to his rather dry disquisition.

The whole review (January 26, 2017).


● From the New York Times review:

‘Yours Unfaithfully,’ on an Open Marriage and Its Pitfalls

By Alexis Soloskijian

...“Yours Unfaithfully,” now receiving its world premiere at the Mint Theater, is a refined, rueful and often shrewd comedy about polyamory, written decades before open relationships were quite so openly discussed. In some ways, it’s surprising that it went unproduced for so long.... But the shock of its content, the gentility of its form and its strong links to Mr. Malleson’s own life must have made it a chancy undertaking.

...When Anne sees Stephen mired in marital and intellectual doldrums, she encourages him to have an affair with their beautiful friend Diana. Stephen is persuaded, Diana is willing, and everything’s just dandy until it isn’t.

...Ultimately, the play’s insistence on the sanctity of open marriage, a stance that apparently reflected Mr. Malleson’s own beliefs and practices, isn’t all that persuasive. If the central claim, that to “live effectively” you must walk the line between “a great slope of complacence on one side” and “rather a mess-up of promiscuity” on the other, sounds reasonably plausible in the moment, that is a credit to the dapper Mr. von Essen. Does the road to moral enlightenment and matrimonial contentment absolutely lead into the beds of selected others? Is there really no other way? Separate vacations, maybe?

But what is extraordinary about Mr. Malleson is his ability to create characters who are capable of feeling several things at once, or who don’t really know what they’re feeling at all. Both Stephen and Anne seem genuinely surprised that their hearts and minds aren’t as orderly as they had believed....

Read the whole review (January 26, 2017). Includes a video excerpt from the production.


● A review in the Times Square Chronicles:

A Delightful Look At Marriage and Fidelity

...Stephen and Anne (Max von Essen and Elisabeth Gray), have been blissfully happy for eight years of marriage and are the envy of all their friends. They are totally committed to living up to their ideals which include an open marriage.

...Stephen’s father the Reverend Canon Gordon Meredith (Stephen Schnetzer) discovers the affair between his son and Diana. Now Anne has to deal with not only her feelings of jealousy, but the fact that others know. This puts the marriage at stake, but in the end love saves the day.

...The cast is exquisite with just the right amount of everything. ... In a time when the world seems out of control, it was nice to be captivated and slip into another time and place. Make sure you catch this sublime endeavor.

The whole review (January 26, 2017).

● Broadway World review (Jan. 31).

● Update February 13: Review on the Huffington Post by Eric Uhlfelder: Between The Ideal And Reality With ‘Yours Unfaithfully’.

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Review of the play MMF, and other poly theater pieces

Remember my announcement about MMF, a new play in New York about a poly breakup?

Well, some of you went, and here's a review. A key excerpt:

By Allan Hunter

...Within the first 4 minutes of the lights going up, Dean states that he's missing someone he is "not supposed to miss", which both introduces [his] reminiscences and sets the emotional tone of the threesome's knotted tangle of unspoken rules and undefined obligations.

Mike Mizwicki, Courtney Alana Ward and Andrew Rincón gave a compellingly stark and believable portrayal of anguished individuals in interaction. Their respective characters, Dean, Jane and Michael, exuded a most infectious frustration that quickly made me want to backhand each of them in turn. Polyamory is a lifestyle choice that requires communication and emotional patience and honesty, a point illustrated in MMF by displaying the outcome of their absence. At no point did any of the trio attempt to discuss with the others what it was that they were doing and how they ought to go about doing it. Not once was the word "polyamory" mentioned, nor was there any sign at any time that they'd noticed that there exists a polyamorous community or that polyamorous people have issues that might be of concern to them. It was not obvious whether they'd ever discussed whether they would opt for sexual exclusivity among the three of them... but we see both Dean and Michael becoming upset when two of the members of the trio have sex in the absence of the third and again when one has sex with an outside person.

We observe them flying blindly in the fog, trying to relate to each other without definitions.... All three are immature and insecure; they badger each other, deliberately inflicting guilt or trying to evoke a sense of obligation as they pry at each other for reassurances that they then cannot believe....

MMF is a well-wrought drama rendered by the three actors in evocatively unsettling tones and phrases and punctuated with awkward pauses. The material is solidly and believably human, the characters three-dimensionally real. But, as my partner Anais remarked, "I'd hate for people to see this and think that this is what polyamory is like!" (I replied, "Yes, that would be as bad as seeing Romeo and Juliet and thinking, 'Oh, so that's what dating is like!'")...

Go read his whole review (Aug. 22, 2014).

Theater buff Mischa Lin of Open Love NY notes,

The play was pretty good, well-acted and one of the more realistic portrayals of a poly situation. I wish it had a little more awareness of polyamory, but this was a scenario where people just fall into it without the education and support of a community. From that perspective, The Three of Us, the winning play in my playwright competition [link], was a far superior play because at least one of the characters actually understood what polyamory is and acted with intention. Those are the stories that will be far more interesting than the accidental threesome stories we’ve seen so far in the vast majority of drama.

------------------------------


Another, more aware piece of theater is Lust & Marriage, a one-woman performance that played earlier this year in Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Seattle and Portland. From the show's description:

Dance Naked Productions Artistic Director Eleanor O’Brien explores the search for love, lust and life partners in this candid look at modern marriage. Does hot monogamy exist? Can polyamory save the happily ever after? #WWDSD? (“What Would Dan Savage Do?”) In this revealing solo performance, O’Brien examines cultural beliefs around monogamy, monotony, jealousy and polyamory from a highly personal perspective. With heaps of humor...

Two-minute trailer.

Here's a review by Ron Richardson; you know him from Cunning Minx's Polyamory Weekly (June 8, 2014).

A review by SeattlePolyChick (June 7, 2014).

And another, in Willamette Week (Jan. 14, 2014).

Interested in more poly theater? Here are all my posts tagged "plays" (including this one; scroll down).

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*Tarantino's Yellow Speedo*: new play about a secret world poly cabal

littlegreenpig.com

Here's the premise of Tarantino's Yellow Speedo, now running in its world premier in Durham, NC, through June 7th:

Set in the Olympic Village, a cell of international athletes train to become an elite task force of sexual operatives determined to bring down the divisions between countries.

This is done by the polyamory training handed down from a mysteriously vanished cult leader; trainers guide trainees through rotations of partnerings, on their way to becoming world-peace diplomats in a transnational, back-channel poly cabal.

That, folks, is what Kerista aspired to be. I wonder if it influenced the playwright, Monica Byrne? She knows her poly stuff.

An enthusiastic review appeared in the Durham arts blog The Five Points Star:

Make Love Not War

By Kate Dobbs Ariail

...It’s about sex, personal freedom, love, and the destruction of the nation-state, more or less in that order of importance. Speedo takes place in the Olympic Village, where athletes from many cultures receive some special training in polyamory and other forms of boundary-busting, taught by “ambassadors” from a cult idolizing a diver named Arturo Tarantino. Tarantino espoused a philosophy of separating oneself from artificial, fear-based constrictions like sexual monogamy and jealousy, and instead making love with many people. He believed that this would erase boundaries between people, lead to world peace and the dissolution of geo-political borders. He called his desirable state of loving psycho-sexual satisfaction “the zone.” One day Tarantino got so completely zoned out that, after executing an “impossible” perfect dive, he just disappeared in the bubbles. His yellow Speedo floated to the top, to become a relic for his followers, and a symbol awarded to trainees who see the light and take off their clothes for this new world order.

...The content, as illustrated by the preposterous story, has challenges for viewers all along the belief spectrum. Although the play declares the glory of polyamory, asserting its naturalness, it looks clearly at one of its costs. Main characters Khala (Nicola Bullock) and Mia (Caitlin Wells) start off as a happy married couple (trapshooters from Team USA); by the end, Mia’s wrecked and stranded on the shores of Khala’s new boundary-free world.

Structurally, the play is very clever.... Byrne and director O’Berski are very skilled at getting you to immediately suspend disbelief and go with the story.

...The only thing I found shocking was the play’s un-ambivalent declaration in favor of unprotected sex — no condoms for all these couplings. In fact, the play’s most memorable line, uttered by Khala after her training partnering with Suileman (Allen Tedder, very elegant), is about his having painted the walls of her vagina with semen graffiti. In Arturian Sex, not only must there be skin-to-skin contact, but exchange of fluids.

...And so impractical, as are the logistics of polyamory (love may be endless, but time is not), that one suspects Tarantino’s Yellow Speedo of being allegorical, on top of fantastical. There’s kind of a Liberty Leading the People quality to it, with the playwright waving the flag and urging the bold freedom fighters over the barricades. At any rate, there’re about five plays worth of ideas woven into 90 short minutes....

The ideas take precedence over relationship development. Khala and Mia are such interesting characters that – although Bullock and Wells were quite fine – I would have liked them to live more fully, to seem less like animations Byrne designed to illustrate her concerns....

...Preview night was sold out, and Manbites Dog reports that tickets for this weekend are nearly gone....

The whole review (May 23, 2014).

-------------------------


In the local Triangle Arts & Entertainment:

...Finding The Zone, or a place of openness, is strived for by six trainees, led by instructors. Arturo Tarantino (Liam O’Neill), the famed Italian diver, and creator of this “Arturian” philosophy of love and sexual liberation, has gone missing; the instructors continue the teachings and practice in his honor. And some of them are pretty intense in their dedication.

The piece, overall, is a love letter to non-monogamy; polyamory consultants were used in the creation of the piece. Byrne is a strong advocate for this way of life, and her passion for it comes through in the story.

...The trainees are randomly paired up, regardless of gender or orientation, over the course of three days. We see these first meetings, broken up between videos of the trainees giving their Olympiad bios; and we learn a lot about these people. Byrne does a fine job rounding them out and creating a fleshed-out batch of characters in 90 minutes, though her ambition to create such a multinational cast led to a fair amount of mediocrity in dialects, though it’s not for lack of trying on the part of the actors.

The actors also handle the sexual components of the show with a strong attack. There’s nudity, folks....

...Overall, Tarantino’s Yellow Speedo provides a necessary conversation on the current state and politics of sex and sexual freedoms, albeit in a clunky delivery at times. It does, however, continue to showcase Monica Byrne’s talents for addressing taboo topics in a fresh, engaging, and captivating way.

The whole review (May 25, 2014).

-------------------------


The mainstream Raleigh News & Observer considered the play mediocre:

Durham production of “Tarantino’s Yellow Speedo” amusing, muddled

By Roy C. Dicks

DURHAM — Is monogamy the best choice for maintaining relationships or can polyamorous coupling lead to greater understanding and caring?

...Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern’s brashly comic, sexually explicit production boldly stages the author’s ideas in often amusing, thought-provoking segments, but the script is not clearly focused and tries to do too much.

From left, Caitlin Wells as Mia and Nicola Bullock as Khala. (Alex Maness photo)

...The exercises are sometimes amusingly awkward, sometimes unexpectedly tender. There are unlikely pairings that work out (a German male cross-dressing wrestler and a South African female fencer) and some that don’t (a Ukrainian male badminton player and a Belizean female hammer thrower).

...The pursuit of polyamorous relationships is an arresting idea, but the Olympics context adds an expectation of fitness (not so for all actors) and of intriguing international differences (squandered here on easy jokes and inauthentic accents). The frequent nudity seems keyed more to each actor’s willingness rather than appropriateness for specific scenes.... Having Arturo appear behind the video screen as a god-like figure spouting his philosophies is amusing at first but becomes repetitive overkill.

...Byrne’s theme gets muddled between farce-like moments and deadly serious discussions. Audiences will find many laugh-worthy moments but may miss the take-away.

Read the whole article (May 23, 2014).

-------------------------

Two years ago, Byrne revealed the mythical backstory of the vanished Tarantino and the secret psychosexual Olympic world cabal (in Raleigh-Durham's Indy Week, August 8, 2012).

-------------------------

Saving the best for last: Matt in North Carolina alerted us, "The writer, director, and members of the cast appeared on NPR's 'The State of Things' [with host Frank Stasio] to discuss the play, and spoke very openly about polyamory and bisexuality — it was a pretty jaw-dropping interview for North Carolina."

Listen here: A New Play Mingles Sex And Diplomacy (19 minutes, WUNC North Carolina Public Radio, May 16, 2014).

Monica Byrne starts off the interview by saying that this is

a play that I thought of because I wanted to address the issue of polyamory in sort of a metaphorical dimension. It means a lot of different things to different people.... I wanted to bring it into a larger public consciousness through theater.

For a lot of people what [poly] means, and what it means to me, is having multiple partners but also being extremely open, and communicative, and kind, to everyone involved. Everyone is onboard. ...And it’s a way of developing long-term relationships, as much as monogamy is.

...The Olympics to me is a metaphor for this phase of my life where I find myself, where I’m in Durham, I’m surrounded by these incredibly beautiful, young, heroic — in my eyes — unmarried people, some of whom I’m involved with, some of whom I’m not, and people I go in and out of being involved with — and that sort of heroic mindset is what inspired the Olympic Village as the setting of this. It’s the sort of goddess and god worship that I find myself doing in Durham....

...Yellow Speedos are the equivalent of gold medals in this sort of underground cult world. If you have won the Speedo that means you have achieved The Zone, which means you’ve transcended possession, feelings of possession. And if you’ve won the yellow Speedo then you go on to be a diplomat in this elite diplomatic corps.

[On monogamy]: To me, when I realized that what I thought was [monogamous] safety was not at all safe, it was actually an extremely liberating moment. I wanted to share that, actually, with the world. That [monogamy] isn’t the way it has to be. That this isn’t the way that anybody has to be.

And my wish — I mean Jay and I have talked about what we want people to go away from this play with — is to just question where they fall on the [poly-mono] spectrum. I think a lot of people don’t question monogamy as the primary relationship model as much as they should. But polyamory and other forms of relationships have such a bad rap, that that prevents that style of love from going forward....

FRANK STASIO: Jay, how do you do that? When you introduce a kind of radical concept like this, a new idea for a lot of us, to take seriously... how do you manage that, as a director?

JAY O’BERSKI: With a lot of candy. Candy around the pill. ...If you can draw an audience in, so that they can hear a much deeper conversation and argument, then you can hook them. And so many plays don’t attempt to go deep with it.... In plays about sexuality, or say racism, there’s sort of a pat on the back with the easy answer. The obvious would be for everybody to realize that polyamory was just “a phase.” Something that selfish people do and then they grow up. Which I think was a bias that I had, and was interesting to explore and get over.

...BYRNE: One of the lines that Arturo comes back to is, “Love must flow in its proper channels or it will destroy the fabric of society.” Which is something his father told him, and something he’s rebelling against. That love just needs to be free-flowing, with no boundaries whatsoever. And you know, it’s kind of like extreme capitalism and extreme communism. The answer lies somewhere along the spectrum.

In polyamory there absolutely are rules of behavior. In fact far more so, I think, than in monogamy, because you have multiple partners. So you need to manage all of their feelings, and all of their expectations, and take care of multiple people, and make sure your needs are bring met in turn. So polyamory is absolutely its own system as well. It just means multiple partners instead of one.

Afterward, Byrne wrote about the radio interview on her blog:

If I could have [had] longer, and it could be edited down so that I’d sound intelligent, I’d talk about so many more things…my “conversion experience” in Belize. How love, monogamy, commitment, and sex are not bound together. How jealousy is an entirely bearable and in fact transformative experience. How everyone I’m with brings out different sides of me that I might not have ever discovered otherwise. How the emphasis on monogamy cheats both women and men. How true intimacy is possible in any relationship where kindness, honesty, and respect are present. How I feel deeply cared for, and care for others, deeply, in turn. How many dear friends I’ve made this way.

How happy I am to be a solo polyamorist.

How my saying that causes a huge range of reactions in people.

Including curiosity.

Getting psyched for the interview.

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