|
Design Credits
Rights and Policies
Staff Login
Rent
the Helen Mills Theater for performances, screenings, and readings.
|
|
Pill Popping Pubescents
by Bryn Manion
Ritalin for Two reviewed August 19, 2004
|
|
|  | |
| (l to r) Jerusha Klemperer & Joan Jubett |
| Photo Credit:Kimo Desean |
| When I was fourteen, I was a Counselor-in-Training at Camp Massasoit. My sole charge was a six-year old named Brendan who was a kind-of-sticky kid; you know the sort, always a tad goopy no matter how often you helped him clean his face or wash his little hands. This child was so sweet and distracted and otherworldly, he was positively arresting. He was prone to making anyone in earshot stop! and listen! to the crickets! Because, as he would assert in this intensely, heartbreakingly singsongy way, “the crickets are my friends.” Brendan had a switch, though, and would sometimes get uncomfortably menacing and try to hurt me. By hurt me, I mean, stab me. Kill me. Brendan was on Ritalin.
Jerusha Klemperer and Joan Jubett, performers and writers extraordinaire of Ritalin for Two, are a tiny bit older than me. In any other theater review, this would be an irrelevant detail; however I am here to make a case for not only how thoroughly entertaining this show is, but how perfectly primed Klemperer and Jubett are to tackle the child-doping phenomenon. They are just younger than the people parenting kids like Brendan and just older than the first generation of Ritalin babies. Consequently, they deal with the issue with glee, wit and enough distance to make a very effective piece of social satire.
 | | |
| Ritalin for Two |
| Photo Credit:Kimo Desean |
| Here is the premise: During a lock down drill at a girl’s school on the Upper East Side, panic attack-prone, over-achiever Lindsey Cohen (Klemperer) holds back from the herd of girls getting shuttled from the basement into a bunker beneath the school long enough to get locked out and left behind. Ne’er do well, chronically late V (Jubett) shows up shortly thereafter to try to steal a soda from the machine in the basement. She is a rebel; she wants anarchy, and would never go with the group in the first place. So there they are, two myopically over-privileged, hormonally challenged girls from opposing cliques alone together to face what may be a) a drill or b) Armageddon. The catch is this: each is on a bevy of prescription drugs and between them there is but one Ritalin pill. They must decide who needs it more: Raging V or Neurotic Lindsey?
Klemperer and Jubett, playing fifteen year olds with abandon, yielding to awkwardness and rage and that dead-earnest, unmistakably teenaged fervor, are just plain wonderful. They fly through the fickle emotions of their angst-ridden characters, zinging out one-liners and exposing Lindsey and V’s prejudices without a bit of guile. They traverse the wild world of the high school social strata knocking into issues like eating disorders, American ethnocentricity, poverty, and terrorism with a supremely strategic flippancy exactly appropriate for satire. Issues are thrown out, but not gnawed upon: it is a great tactic to provoke thought.
|  | |
| Ritalin for Two |
| Photo Credit:Kimo Desean |
| Thought is really an after-taste here, though. The pace is charmingly sleep-over party-esque with intermittent breaks into song (V) and standup (Lindsey) that illuminate the girls' pure adolescent need to be noticed. At one point, Lindsey riffs about being noticed on the street, as though being noticed validates one’s existence. Klemperer’s Lindsey is so earnest, sympathetic and funny, it is not until much later that I realized how thematically valuable and fundamentally true her statement was.
What kind of world are we creating when our kids have to get high just to deal with their parents' mistakes and anxieties? To be noticed? Right now, I am thinking of sweet, little Brendan singing the song from Ghostbusters a bit off because of his speech impediment (he would softly and absently call them ghost-butchers which some thought was further reason to sedate the poor kid). Brendan would be twenty-two by now, on the precipice of adulthood, probably never having known a drug-free day in his life. Maybe he really needed all those medications? Or maybe he just needed to run around outside more than the rest of the kids? It is a killer question that I am grateful to Klemperer and Jubett for raising.
 Click here to view the printer-friendly version of this review
|
|
Under St. Marks
|
Category: Comedy
Written by: Joan Jubett & Jerusha Klemperer
Directed by: Rosemary Andress
Produced by: The Loft
Opened: August 4, 2004
Closed: August 28, 2004
Running Time: 59 minutes
Theater: Under St. Marks
Address: 94 St. Mark's Place
New York, NY 10009
Yahoo! Maps Directions
| |
|
Tickets: $15.00
not available
|
|
|
Creative Team
Written by: Jerusha Klemperer & Joan Jubett
Directed by: Rosemary Andress
Set & Light Designer: Kimo DeSean
Sound Designer: Jonathan Sanborn
Fight Choreographer: Melody Bates
Cast
Jerusha Klemperer as Lindsey
Joan Jubett as V
Karl Herlinger as The Voice of Authority
Crew
Stage Manager: Jessica Urtecho
Electrician: Adrian Mukasa
|
|
|
|
|
|
