Perhaps part of the problem can be assigned to director Melissa Maxwell, who seems lost trying to manage such a play. There’s also problematic lighting design by Adrianna Desier Durantt (also the costume designer): it doesn’t succeed in its attempt to divide a San Francisco pad from a good Christian Mississippi home. In some of the play's weaker moments the cast looks confused about how to behave; it’s unclear how much of the mostly disappointing performances can be ascribed to the actors, directors, or playwright. In any event, the frustrations of Taboos ultimately wipe out what makes the story interesting.
The plot needs less a description and more a diagram, and in an excellently rendered scene towards the end, we see where the divides occur. But I’ll try to describe it anyway:
• A lesbian couple each have a baby with their respective partner’s brother.
• One of the brothers, a Mississippi Christian struggling to have a kid of his own, takes the other partner’s embryo from the ICSI fertilization to have a kid with his even more dogmatic wife.
• When the Mississippi mother develops post-partum psychosis from her son’s colic, the Mississippi son is brought to San Francisco, where he forms a bond with his essential twin brother. The lesbian mother of his embryo (but not of his prenatal development) also builds an attachment to the Mississippi son while nursing him.
It’s a situation that would understandably take a long time to explain in the play, but it’s not Taboo’s job to provide a legal report. Theater won’t rewrite family law, nor will it change the mind of the Leon Kasses of the world. What theater can do is help make a complicated social, ethical, and political situation relatable to human characters. Ultimately, despite his best efforts, Djerassi can’t fulfill this promise.
Taboos by Carl Djerassi. Directed by Melissa Maxwell; set design by Lauren Helpern; lighting and costume design by Adrianna Desier Durantt; Video/production design by S. Katy Tucker; sound design by Arielle Edwards. Photos by Richard Termine.
Starring Blake Delong (Max Carruthers), Julie Leedes (Sally Parker), Helen Merino (Harriet Carruthers), John G. Preston (Cameron Parker), and Jenn Schulte (Priscilla Parker).
Taboos is presented by Redshift Productions at the SoHo Playhouse, 15 Vandam St., NYC. Sept. 19-Oct. 19. Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 3 p.m. (212) 691-1555 or www.sohoplayhouse.com.
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