If you want a hint of what you’re in for at Jen Silverman’s Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties, get to the Lucille Lortel Theatre a few minutes early and groove to the all-girl rap and R&B preshow playlist, a supercool, sexually explicit mix that features artists including Awkwafina, Cardi B, and Janelle Monáe, whose “Make Me Feel” could practically be the Betties’ theme song: “It’s like I’m powerful with a little bit of tender/ An emotional sexual bender.”
All five of the Betties are pretty freaking fantastic women: rich, skinny, alcoholic, gluten-free New York housewife Betty 1 (Dana Delany); Betty 2 (Adina Verson), whose hand puppet is her best friend; Betty 3 (Ana Villafañe of On Your Feet!), aka “Sephora with the ass Betty”; tattooed truck lover Betty 4 (Orange Is the New Black star/erstwhile Obie Awards host Lea DeLaria, also credited in the program as “Butch Truck Consultant”); and Betty 5 (Chaunté Wayans), “a gender-non-conforming masculine-presenting female-bodied” boxing instructor. And none of them, incidentally, bear any resemblance, to Betty Boop, the Depression-era cartoon sex symbol with the big eyes, button nose, heart-shape pout, and barely-there strapless dress.
Collective Rage is an actor’s dream: Silverman has created smart, go-for-broke characters with wit and depth; she gives everyone a chance to shine (each Betty has at least one killer monologue that directors are sure to be hearing in auditions everywhere); and she has a wicked way with a one-liner. (Betty 5 to Betty 1: “If you got a great rack, you got a great rack. It’s like, scientific.” Betty 3 to Betty 4: “I have become the voice of a generation and my generation has a lot to say, even if we don’t spell very well!”) She also has a way with transitions; sample scene change supertitle: “Betty 4 and 5 Work on Their Trucks and Talk About Relationships, Which Is Just Another Word for Pussy.” And I can’t imagine a better bunch of Betties, especially Delany—who knew Upper East Side repression could be so chic?—and Villafañe.
But the storyline—what there is of one—sags under the weight of such commanding characters. Silverman brings the Betties together through “The Thea-Tah” (they all pronounce it that way): Betty 3 saw a “very complicated,” “very famous” play. “It was about these people who fell in love with each other and they did terrible things to make sure that nobody loved anybody else and then other people put on a play inside of the first play,” she explains to Betty 4. The title was “Summer’s Midnight Dream.” Now, she’s “decided to throw a play, which will be the best part of that play, which was the littler play.”
It’s not that the setup is contrived. (Shakespeare has done far worse.) It’s that the production of “the littler play” goes pretty much nowhere. At least the casting process yields some of those aforementioned wicked one-liners. Betty 3, asking Betty 5 to play a Wall: “In times of need and crisis you stay solid, like when that pair of tits from New Jersey told me she couldn’t date me anymore because she had a boyfriend, and you let me come over and sit in your truck and drunk-text her death-threats.” Betty 3 to Betty 1: “You can be the Moonshine, white girl.”
The play’s full title, incidentally, is Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties; In Essence, a Queer and Occasionally Hazardous Exploration; Do You Remember When You Were in Middle School and You Read About Shackleton and How He Explored the Antarctic?; Imagine the Antarctic As a Pussy and It’s Sort of Like That. But it might as well be Six Characters in Search of a Story. The sixth character, in case you’re wondering, is Betty 2’s pussy. She gets an entire song to close the show.
Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties opened Sept. 12, 2018, and runs through Oct. 7 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. Tickets and information: mcctheater.org
