The Box-Checking Work Begins: Merry Me
Here is a sampling of the laugh lines in Merry Me:
(a) A wife to her husband when he gets the chance to prove himself to his dad: “Hooray! It’s all you’ve ever wanted all the years of your privileged yet unremarkable life!”
(b) That husband, a sad straight white guy, to the woman who kinda likes him but has been sent on a divine mission to kill him: “Did I just unwittingly ignite your rage with my non-woke white-person wallowing?”
(c) That woman, arguing that maybe there are other options besides her killing said sad straight white guy: “I could domesticate him, make him take out the recycling, fix the dishwasher, while making him think this is somehow a show of his magnificent masculinity, no?”
(d) That woman’s friend, a super-sexy masc lesbian soldier, to her when she protests that she simply can’t fulfill her divine, murderous mission: “Of course you can. Women always feel they are underqualified.”
If you find (e) All of the above hilarious, then get yourself to New York Theatre Workshop. If you half-chuckled, or gave a tiny sigh, or did both at once while vaguely wondering whether you’re a bad person for not going full ROTFLMAO, then follow me.
Hansol Jung’s Merry Me is a self-described lesbian sex comedy — with marketing full of eggplant and peach emoji — developed by Jung and director Leigh Silverman in the years since their 2018 collaboration Wild Goose Dreams. Busting out of its trousers with sources, the play riffs on Restoration comedy (specifically William Wycherley’s The Country Wife), Greek drama and poetry (Sappho, of course), Shakespeare, Tony Kushner, David Bowie, Melissa Etheridge, even Our Town. Jung is a writer who loves burbling, semi-chaotic language — in Wild Goose Dreams, she turned the internet into a chattering human chorus — and Merry Me often has the feeling of an overfilled Champagne flute: It’s a giddy cascade of bubbles, and it gives all the signals of being a saucy, silly good time. And sometimes it is. But often, underneath Merry Me’s fizz, there’s an off-putting tartness. It’s the familiar flavor of winking, post-woke comedy — post- because it’s hyper-self-aware; I mean, who would srsly describe themselves as “woke” these days? With such a taste in our mouths, the laughter shrinks in our throats. It’s not gone, but to let it out is no longer an act of glorious release but a display of cultural fluency: We get it.
And there’s a lot to get. Merry Me is narrated by an angel (Shaunette Renée Wilson) who will eventually reveal herself to be the “angel from Angels in America, as brought to you by the Ellen McLaughlin on that fateful day of May 1991.” There will be a broken dam’s worth of literary and pop-cultural references along with a steady flow of double entendres. There will be a cornucopia of jokes along the lines of “I am straight! Let me internalize my self-hatred so it can manifest in secret taboo sexual behavior.” But before any and all of the above, the angel has to set the scene.
“Welcome to our play, Merry Me,” says Wilson at the top of the show. “Written by Hansol; directed by Leigh. David is Aga Memnon, Cindy is Mrs. Memnon …” She lists the cast. She reminds us of the conventions of the theater — she, the actor, will be doing the challenging job of imagining “a disappearing bright morning star while staring at a blinding spotlight,” and we, the audience, will be doing the equally challenging job of imagining “miles and miles of sandy beach dotted by naval tents while trapped inside a dark room with a small patch of stage space that indicates as much.”
Though I love a good fourth-wall smashing, the angel’s patter sidles close to cutesy and might cross the line were it not for Wilson. Dashing, resplendent, and doing the most while staying so relaxed I wanted the number for her masseuse, Wilson is what you’d get if you were playing Dungeons & Dragons and your bard rolled a natural 20 at every goddamned charisma check. She looks great, she sounds great, and she knows how to accent the more sincere strains of wit and playfulness in Jung’s text. If a play is going to be winking at you for 90 minutes, then you really need a cast of genuine charmers. Merry Me has that, and with Silverman — whose smart, farcical staging prompts the kind of robust laughter at which the play itself sometimes swings and misses — the excellent ensemble keeps the beach ball of the show up in the air, even when the ball itself deflates.
As the angel has indicated, we’re on a naval base on an unnamed small island where General Memnon (David Ryan Smith) is fretting over a blackout that’s holding up his attack on a neighboring unnamed country. As with his classical namesake, a higher power has hindered him on his way to war. “It’s odd how vibrators are the only electric devices that still work,” says Sapph (Nicole Villamil), who has recently married the general’s “very woke” son, Private Willy Memnon (Ryan Spahn). In the absence of war, sexy-times reign. Lieutenant Shane Horne (the magnetic Esco Jouléy), a human aphrodisiac, has been doing her best to “fulfill my God-given mission … to provide merries to ladyparts of all shapes, colors, and vintages.” Yet despite dalliances with every lady(part) on the island, including the general’s lusty wife, Clytemnestra (Cindy Cheung), Horne is forlorn. As she explains to her friend and psychiatrist, Dr. Jess O’Nope (Marinda Anderson), she can give but she has yet to receive. No merries for Shane.
Merries is the play’s twee slang for orgasms, so the title is Shane Horne’s quest. It’s a plot lifted from The Country Wife, in which the rakish hero, Harry Horner, pretends to be impotent in order to get boatloads of sympathy booty. But Jung doesn’t just borrow the plot herself; she has her protagonist do it consciously. The “shapely shouldered” lieutenant has recently been released from solitary (the consequence of cuddling with Clytemnestra), where she did some reading, including Wycherly. Shane wants Dr. Jess to corroborate a rumor that she, Horne, the great lady whisperer, was “zapped” with conversion therapy while in the brig and has “returned to the world as Straight as a Road through Nevada.”
That’s a good line, and the thunder and lightning that crash after it make it even better. But then we get a dose of dutiful realism. “Shane,” says Jess soberly, “gay conversion therapy is not a real thing. It’s a dangerous, dishonest, and violent practice discredited by modern medicine … I could lose my medical license.” Horne is skeptical. “We do not live in a world where people lose licenses for traumatizing a gay person’s psyche,” she says. The crowd responds with a profound, agreeing “Mmm.”
Moments like this pop up frequently in Merry Me. It’s not that they aren’t hard facts — of course they are; that’s the point. That hardness is supposed to bring us up short, a kind of extra-serious “but seriously, folks.” Yet the vibe in the room is too knowing for us to receive anything as a real gut punch. Ironically, where we should be least comfortable, we are in fact most congratulated — confirmed in our canniness, our preexisting recognition of just how rotten the world is. At this point, the game is too easy: You just lower your head and look a little chastened and a lot aware. It’s clapter without the clapping.
But self-consciousness, both political and theatrical, is Merry Me’s idiom. Shane Horne knows she’s in a play and also making one. “I need my five acts of my fake broken penis to get to my merry,” she insists to Jess, after having snapped her back from a moment of digression by reminding her that “the point of this scene” is for them to set her chosen plot in motion. When that plot finally does get rolling — and when Jung starts to fold in elements of a particularly rich and heart-open piece of source material — the play’s lungs expand and its actors get a chance to loft it skyward.
That source is Twelfth Night. Due to requisite comic shenanigans, Sapph ends up meeting Horne while dressed “in boy drag” (her boy name becomes Saphastian, an amusing mash-up of Sappho and Sebastian, one of Twelfth Night’s twins). Sparks fly, and Jung crafts a lovely reversal of Shakespeare’s moment in which the woman being wooed asks the girl-dressed-as-a-boy how he would woo her. Instead, it’s the one in disguise who here gets to say, breathlessly, “What would you do?” Jung has elegantly blurred the lines between Viola and Olivia: Sapph and Horne are each, at the same time, both. Villamil and Jouléy drop into themselves, funny and vulnerable, hungry and tender. It’s their relationship that will build into the play’s heart and bring out some of Jung’s cleverest and warmest writing. Eventually — after a mischievous letter mix-up that employs Spahn’s entertainingly dim-but-driven Private Willy as a riff on Silvius from As You Like It — Sapph and Horne’s budding romance bursts into sublimely silly song. With Wilson’s angel DJ-ing, their love ballad is a high point in the show’s delightful sound design, by Caroline Eng and Kate Marvin. “I … I will be king,” sings Horne, this time wonderfully oblivious of whom she’s stealing from. “And you … you will be king, also.”
In ye-olde-comedy tradition, Merry Me has a B plot and a C plot to go along with its A — Horne’s quest for climax and her love story with Sapph. C involves the general’s frustration over his impotence in both battle and bed and is mostly there for, in the regular sense, merries. Smith is a lot of fun stomping around and huffing and puffing orders into a military camp phone that his wife constantly reminds him is just “A. Paper. Fucking. Cup!!” on a string. And as that wife, Cheung is the play’s most underused resource — not that there’s that much more room for Clytemnestra dramaturgically, but Cheung is just so good that we want more of her. When Horne tries to put off her salivating advances by insisting she has gone straight, Cheung gets maximum hilarity out of Clytemnestra’s conspiratorial response: “That’s how we want to play it today,” she purrs, ready for role-play time. “We are just a coupla straight-ass ladies, having some straight-ass explorations of the female condition, in a hostile environment.”
The B plot is cribbed from Kushner and is the most theater-insider-baseball of the three. Yes, Angels in America is famous, but you do have to be a certain person to laugh every time Wilson says the pronoun I three times in a row, or when she crashes through the set to announce to Anderson’s Jess O’Nope, “Greetings, Prophet … the Great Work begins.” Jess’s name is a strained pun on “yes or no”: As this play’s prophet, she’ll be the one presented with a fateful choice. Will she embrace her “queer female rage” and take on the angel’s mission of saving the world by murdering half of humanity with a celestial ax, starting with a “targeted effort to kill off cis-gendered male species of European descent”?
As expansive and entertaining as Wilson is (Smith and Cheung are also a lot of fun when they show up as fellow angels later in the play), this is where things start to slide, once again, toward the facile. Not that Merry Me — or any play — shouldn’t aspire to take on real injustices in the course of its comedy, but the tactic it has picked often feels like the easy choice, the one most likely to get that sophisticated “Mmm,” that ready-made laugh. At its best, the show is bigger than that, and (small spoiler alert, but given the spirit of the thing, not really) near the end there comes a crucial moment when Jess reflects on what she’s feeling after a cis-gendered, European-descended male of the straight persuasion has been removed from the picture. “Oh, interesting, look at that,” she ponders. “The extra space isn’t really doing anything for my merries or my rage. Funny how that is revealed to us now.”
A massive perspective shift — a hard, humane one — is contained in this line. But coming so late in the action and representing such a small percentage of the text, it flies by more quickly than it should, just another joke in the jumble. Merry Me has a heart, and it has wit and mischief and plenty of smarts. If only it spent less of its time appealing to our contemporary brand of softly self-flagellating vanity, it might have been merrier still, and riskier, and more free.
Merry Me is at New York Theatre Workshop through November 19.
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