Photo by Max Blodgett
Bruce Norris’s The Pain and the Itch is a tricky piece of dramatic machinery. Its structure is carefully convoluted, painstakingly difficult, and yet, by the end, complete and exact. It’s just a tough journey to get there.
Director Courtney Ulrich (COL ‘11) uses the main characters to speak out against the audience, presenting a worldview so accurate it seems to exist purely to ridicule and deflate the viewers. And for the most part, Ulrich gets away with it.
Because luckily, The Pain and the Itch is pretty hilarious. I found myself laughing more as I got progressively more annoyed, and then getting annoyed at myself for laughing. It’s sort of exhilarating to be in such a wacky labyrinth of expectations and self-righteousness, and Nomadic Theatre does a hell of a job executing the tricky contraption. The Pain and The Itch isn’t always exactly fun, but it certainly impresses.
Clay (Jamie Scott, COL ‘10) and Kelly (Lily Kaiser, COL ‘12) are an upper-middle-class, liberal-leaning couple. Kelly is a frigid career woman, Clay an emasculated stay-at-home dad. They have an infant son with sharp teeth, and a daughter (played by child actress Helena Lessne) with some sort of pain and itch in her nether regions. There is an Arab man (Joseph Grosodonia, COL ‘10) in their home, for reasons that are not immediately clear. Also around are Clay’s brother, Cash (John Roach, COL ‘13), an arrogant plastic surgeon, his girlfriend, a sexy Slavic immigrant named Kalina (Kate Stonehill, SFS ‘12), and Cash and Clay’s mother, Carol (Francesca Pazniokas, COL ‘11), a teacher who watches PBS and repeats herself a lot. These five or six people fight. A lot. They fight about money, Republicans, family histories, Slavic countries, sex, lack of sex, how to raise children, porn, fig bread, violence in the media, the pronunciation of “perspective,” and who or what has been taking big bites out of their avocados. They fight loudly, quickly, and with everyone talking over everyone else.
The constant arguing is exhausting to watch, but thankfully, the cast handles the mood well. Kaiser and Scott may lack some heaviness in their roles, but they adeptly deal with mood switches, overlapping dialogue, and their complicated relationship with aplomb. Stonehill and Pazniokas are pitch perfect and immediately recognizable, often uncomfortably so. Roach has real charisma, and may be the only sympathetic character in the play. (When the good guy has slicked backed hair and makes fun of his girlfriend, you know you’re in trouble.)
The production itself is gorgeous. The set is perfect—everything you need to know about this couple can be seen in their DVD collection, not to mention their art, photographs, and vaguely ethnic vases. A neat bit of stagecraft with the table helps flip from scene to scene, and the entrances and exits are well-timed as to never be distracting. The cast moves through their perfectly articulated world like a well-oiled machine, only stopping and slowing down at the big moments, which come telegraphed with poses and intense glares. It isn’t subtle, but it works.
A performance that takes its audience on a complicated mental rollercoaster generally doesn’t also manage to keep them laughing and entertained. But after watching The Pain in the Itch, the viewer is left not only contemplative and slightly mind-boggled, but with a few surprising, quotable jokes to lighten the mood.
