Why Are These Grown Women Acting Like Teens?
Performers
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In Clare Barron‘s new show at Playwrights Horizons, age isn’t a number, it’s a state of mind. The quirky one-act explores the camaraderie and competition among the female members of an adolescent dance troupe. Though they’re on the cusp of puberty, they’re played by a diverse cast of performers who range from their twenties to their sixties. So the actors channel the girls they once were while embodying the women these characters will eventually become.
Lucy Taylor, who falls somewhere in the middle of that age spectrum, plays Ashlee, the most confident of the bunch. She has a jaw-dropping, show-stopping, four-page monologue in which she not only owns her attractiveness and intelligence, she promises to wield them as weapons. Originally, the script specified that Ashlee was 14. But during rehearsals Barron, Taylor and director-choreographer Lee Sunday Evans realized that if she were just one year younger, the scene would feel more dangerous.
“It makes what she says sound a little bit more taboo,” says Taylor, who moved to New York from Australia in 2005 to join the award-winning avant-garde theatre company Elevator Repair Service. “There’s that line when Ashlee says, ‘I wish I could show you my ass but I’m only 13.’ There’s a big difference between 13 and 14. Fourteen feels so much older. At 13 Ashlee truly does have one foot in the tween camp and the other very much in womanhood.”
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Taylor, who is the mother of a 10-year-old son, says she and her castmates often get so caught up in the adolescent mind-set during performances, they’re startled when they spot their adult reflections. “There’s a scene when we have to look in the mirror and put our makeup on and we’re like, ‘Oh right, we’re not 13 at all,'” Taylor says. But that duality, the young soul emanating from the grown body, is what makes the show work. “I think if we had to consciously play the characters as the idea of what we think teenagers are like — the way they talk with the intonation that rises up at the end of sentences — we would get into trouble,” says Taylor. “We’re operating within the limits of our bodies and our voices. No one is attempting to play younger and I think that’s the key to why the play is so exciting. It isn’t really about teenagers; it’s about women.”
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