Heather (Colby Minifie) and Carla (Amy Forsyth) face off in Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Pinteresque play The Wasp.
In Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s The Wasp, two women—Carla (Amy Forsyth) and Heather (Colby Minifie)—meet at an outdoor café. Carla arrives first. Heavily pregnant, she lights a cigarette and, even seated, has a swagger about her. When Heather enters and sees Carla, she launches into nervous small talk, which Carla swats away with silence. The initial tension seems to stem from Carla’s dour and angry demeanor, but as the play unfolds, the core conflict revolves around their shared past, future consequences, and a morally difficult proposition.
The meeting is not random: the two women were best friends in middle school until Carla became Heather’s bully. Heather didn’t ask Carla to meet to hash out the details of the past, but to ask her to kill her husband. Heather remembers Carla as a cruel person and believes, if anyone can do the job, it would be Carla. She offers her a lot of money which Carla needs. She’s pregnant with her fifth child and desperate for cash; her husband is not making much and drinking away most of his wages. When she agrees, the two women set a day to meet at Heather’s home to plan the murder.
Heather has been carrying an enormous weight that she is ready to exorcise.
Although Heather and Carla grew up in the same town and attended the same school, everything about their appearance and mannerisms indicates they’ve gone in different directions since their teen years. The contrast between them is emphasized by Rodrigo Muñoz’s simple costuming and the actors’ physical attitudes. Heather, in slacks and a button-up shirt made of a silky material, appears very middle class. She speaks in a posh accent and holds her pinky up when she sips her tea. Carla’s slurry speech, full of contractions and dropped endings, reveal a lack of education beyond their school days. She wears track pants, a black T-shirt, and sneakers with enormous hoop earrings which add a touch of hip-hop street style.
When Heather was being bullied by Carla, she reacted passively, perhaps in disbelief that her friend could turn so viciously on her. But one final act of cruelty scarred Heather for life. She tells Carla, it feels like “inside me there’s a growth. It’s growing. Not unlike, I assume, a baby. Or a tumor. Or a parasite (…) A phantom growth, if you like (…) And recently, I’ve been working out a way to release it.” Twenty years later, Heather is ready for revenge to exorcise the thing that she feels has been growing inside her.
Carla, now at Heather’s mercy, says she has changed. She argues that her bad upbringing led her to act out:
I may have been violent in the past, but I’ve never been this premeditated. Even when I was my worst at school, I never thought about it much. I don’t know why I’d do it. I mean, we’re animals, right?
Carla looks indomitable but is really still a wounded child at heart. Photographs by Emilio Madrid.
She doesn’t see how Heather’s version, all planned out and reasoned, is any better than what she did, which were acts of impulse.
Lloyd Malcolm’s script is reminiscent of a Harold Pinter play in which the slow pacing, Heather’s mix of friendly conversation and cruel manipulation of Carla, and the muddiness of the outcome, take on a violence of their own. Rory McGregor’s direction highlights the tension in the play by elongating the quiet moments to elevate the viciousness—both verbal and physical—that emerges from the characters.
The play is performed in a funky, little loft space in the Financial District, unencumbered by the usual pillars that most old New York City spaces feature, allowing for a clean set design by Scott Pask. The stage is first stripped down to resemble an outdoor café. Then, after a blackout and scene change, Pask creates Heather’s home: a neat English living room dominated by shades of green (an emerald-green velvet couch, a lighter green easy chair, and patterned green wallpaper). These specific hues of green highlight Heather’s primness. Stacey Derosier’s lighting creates dramatic tension with several blackouts, and Brian Hickey’s sound design is subtle and effective.
The themes of bullying and revenge are well explored in the play. The writing, a philosophical and cyclical meditation on the nature of violence, reveals the conundrum at the heart of the issue. In the end, the characters’ anger over the past and the present wrongs can’t overcome the fact that violence is never a means to an end and Heather concludes: “Violence is violence is violence.”
The Wasp by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, plays through Nov. 15 and is performed in a loft in the Financial District (16 Beaver St., No. 5). Evening performances are at 8 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and on Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit littleenginetheater.com.
Playwright: Morgan Lloyd Malcolm
Director: Rory McGregor
Set Design: Scott Pask
Lighting Design: Stacey Derosier
Sound Design: Brian Hickey
Costume Design: Rodrigo Muñoz
Fight Choreography: Steve White
