Review: "Open" Is in Great Shape and Willing to Host

Open

Written by Jaixa Irizarry

Directed by Zoe Mintz

Presented by Laurizarry at The Tank

312 W 36th St, Manhattan, NYC

August 5, 2024

Open begins with one kind of opening of the body, a type that scholar Julia Kristeva would class as abject and that involves a short, sharp dash across the stage for protagonist Ivy, played by the show's playwright, Jaixa Irizarry. Soon, though, Ivy recrosses the stage and returns to the business at hand, the nature of which is suggested by the subreddit which she has been frequenting: r/Random-Acts-Of-Blowjob (yes, it is an actual subreddit, which currently claims 619,000 members and lists r/RandomActsOfMuffDive as the sole entry under "Friends and supporters" on its menu). Throughout the play, Ivy's Reddit-facilitated encounters provide windows–sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes infused with pathos, frequently hilarious–onto human wants and needs, including but far from limited to sexuality and the dynamics of (gendered) power, control, and desire. This week's staged reading of Open was presented as part of The Tank's LimeFest 2024, which "invites new works by emerging artists and creative teams who identify as women, nonbinary or gender non-conforming to make way for more gender parity in the performing arts" and continues through August 21st.

What kind of person would post on this subreddit (closely akin to the "casual encounters" section of the now defunct Craigslist personals)? What kind of person would respond? Open commendably avoids reductive answers to such questions and instead suggests that one cannot assume that everyone seeking oral sex on an internet forum is, say, a misogynist (and/or) incel, even as it does ultimately identify some common threads among the male posters, and men in general (and although guys in tech are admittedly a bit overrepresented among the sampling of men whom we see). Jonah (Pedro Vierre), for example, is closest to the stereotype that probably comes to mind–self–centered and overwhelmingly monosyllabic–but Will (Padraig Bond) is somewhat more complicated than his "well, actually"-forward demeanor, lonely Luca (Liam McGowan) is impacted by medication, and Max (Nick Fawwaz) seems genuinely down-to-earth and respectful. One of Ivy's conversations raises the question of whether soliciting fellatio on Reddit is simply a more straightforward–more open–version of dating apps. And the–partly evasive–reason that Ivy gives more than once for responding to these men's ads is that she wants "to feel good," which of course can have multiple meanings, much like "open" can and does, its available senses in the play encompassing physical or emotional openness, openness to people or experience(s), a description or a command.

Ivy posits that men are more likely to reveal, deliberately or otherwise, things about themselves, their psychology and character (which are inevitably interlinked with social constructions), after sex acts, especially (potentially) NSA ones. The most Jonah says at once is when he is told he isn't going to get his blowjob, but Ivy also ends up having discussions about everything from family to chess to the climate apocalypse–this last taking on a layer of meta humor as Padraig Bond, who plays Will, is also the author of the Climate Fables, a series of plays dealing with exactly that subject. We hear each man's ad at different points (there is also a great recorded audio montage of DMs at a certain juncture), and their being read aloud, including any emojis or emoticons, underscores their inherent silliness (and the silliness of much of our culture's [masculine] posturing around sex) while also pointing to their performativity. Performance is embedded in all of Ivy's interactions with these men; beyond the ads themselves, Michael (Sadi Bimwala), for instance, is very interested in receiving some sort of rating after their encounter, and Jack's (Luis Feliciano) enthusiasm for consent and pleasing others starts after a while to sound performative to some degree too. Neither, obviously, is Ivy exempt from curating her self-presentation and setting limits on her openness, in its various senses. The cast, charismatically anchored by Irizarry, adeptly brings out the humanity and humor in Open's sharp dialogue and well drawn characters, with Vierre delivering one of the show's simultaneously most intensely comic and dramatic scenes opposite Irizarry. Open leaves some things implied and some questions, well, open, respecting the audience enough to withhold a neat plot bow at the end. At one point, Ivy points out that everything in our culture seems beholden to male fantasy, and it is difficult to find anything, no matter how atypical or unlikely, that falls outside those bounds. If Open does not provide a roadmap for redrawing such boundaries, it draws our attention to them, which is significant in itself, and it has fun doing so.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards