"Issue #9" by Briana Bartenieff
Terrors of adolescence play out
in an upstate gas station's convenience store

 
WHERE AND WHEN:
April 4 to 21, 2024 (closed)
Theater for the New City, 155 First Ave. (at E. Tenth Street)
Presented by Theater for the New City
Reviewed by Paul Berss April 14, 2024

L-R: Sandy Melissa Garcia and Ada Victoria.

The theme of Issue #9 was clearly stated from the beginning with a film of super-thin models on runways and TV ads about losing weight.    A singer on a pedestal sang "Amazing Grace," holding a sword in one hand and a scale in the other - a la the Statue of Liberty, but offering her paean not to democracy but to slimness.  The musical, written and directed by Briana Bartenieff, with music by J.H. Greenwell, actually tackles a subject that has brought grief and sickness to young women who bought into body-shaming, and to their families.

We find ourselves in a convenience store adjoining a gas station.  Enter Natalie, a young widow who has come to work in the store, and her daughter Lexi, about aged 14.  They are soon introduced to two young women, Candy and Ashley, who frequent the store to buy fashion magazines.  The girls are obsessed with fashion and fitness, and get to work on Lexi, convincing her that she is fat and unattractive.  Unfortunately Lexi, needing friends and feeling vulnerable, is influenced by their toxic attitude and starts both hating and starving herself.  Lexi sinks lower and lower into depression and, in an extreme mood of self-hatred, the young girl takes pills, left behind by a drug-addicted employee of the store, and dies.

Natalie, grief-stricken and enraged, wants revenge. Counting Candy and particularly Ashley responsible for her daughter's death, she puts poison in the perfume samples of the magazines they read, which results in the death of Ashley.   Sadly, the magazines are bought by innocent people who also died.   Natalie confesses and goes to prison, but not before she and her daughter's ghost reunite and forgive each other.

There were times when the delivery of lines seemed more rehearsed than natural, but all in all the cast acquitted itself very well.  They were all accomplished singers (the less said about two dance segments the better, they were amateurishly choreographed and performed).  The evening was, for the most part, quite engrossing, and writer Bartenieff did not sugar-coat her serious subject: the tragedy of self-hatred and the unrelenting pressure to conform to a certain image. [pb]