“Thirty is the new twelve,” declares one of the three young women in GEORGIA MERTCHING IS DEAD. And were we to take some of the more superficially sophomoric dialogue in this new play by Catya McCullen out of context, that assessment might actually seem generous.
MERTCHING (the producer requests that the title be stylized in all caps) follows this trio of longtime friends—Gretchen, who’s 33, and Emma and Whitney, each three years younger—on a road trip from New York to North Carolina, where they’ll attend the funeral of another woman, presumably just slightly older, who’s been a central figure in all of their lives. Along the way, and before they even hop in the car, there will be giddy girl talk sprinkled with scatological and sexual references—Gretchen kicks things off by describing her toddler daughter’s fondness for “butt-related activity,” one of the cleaner descriptions used here—along with the kind of angsty navel-gazing millennials are regularly assailed for.
“Do you think I’m a ridiculous person?” asks Whitney, who can’t seem to stop doing self-destructive things at work. “Yes,” answers Emma, who can’t seem to stop doing self-destructive things in her personal life.
But it quickly emerges that these women have had more to deal with than most of their peers, and that Georgia is not their first friend who died prematurely. Gretchen, Emma and Whitney are all recovering addicts, who got into drugs and alcohol while still adolescents; Whitney is celebrating 15 years of sobriety when the play opens, and Gretchen at one point recalls being just a year older when her problem was recognized. The bond between them and Emma is informed by more than memories of hip-hop hits and first dates, and McCullen invests it with a clear-eyed compassion and zesty humor that makes her characters more endearing and memorable than many fictional representatives of their generation have been of late.
The playwright has also her given the women contrasting and complementary personalities and experiences, without making them contrived or stereotypical, and the actresses playing them all flourish under Giovanna Sardelli’s energetic, empathic direction. Gretchen is, on the surface, the feistiest, but also the most settled in her personal life, married and nine months pregnant with a second child. A robustly expressive, heavily padded Diana Oh makes her an outsized presence in every sense of that word—funny, profane and fiercely loyal, a mama bear outside the home as well as in it.
Emma is in some ways Gretchen’s foil, a writer who keeps falling in and out of relationships that shred her self-esteem, and Claire Siebers gives her a somber air with a dry twist, and a distinct sense of thwarted longing. Whitney, an ingenuous lesbian, is described in McCullen’s stage directions as “an ambitious queer bird” (and “super weird”), and Layla Khoshnoudi captures her drive and her relative innocence, whether she’s agonizing over career struggles or addressing her late mom during a stop at a trailer park. (Alexis Distler’s minimal, fanciful scenic design uses props such as neon signs and stuffed animals to establish tone in a variety of settings.)
There are a couple of male characters in MERTCHING as well. Gretchen’s husband, Jeremy, as played by JD Taylor, looks like the kind of cute beta male who might be fascinated but eventually overwhelmed by her, but Taylor and Oh forge a charming chemistry that makes both the tensions between them and their devotion to each other palpable. As Emma’s filmmaker ex, Harlan, Quincy Dunn-Baker plays a darker, more elusive type, but he and Siebers make it plain that neither character is solely responsible for the enduring, troubled dynamic between them.
“I think, my whole life, I’ve wanted to be someone else,” Emma admits to Harlan in one heated moment. But with GEORGIA MERTCHING IS DEAD, McCullen celebrates a special sort of resilience that’s rooted in a sense of self, while showing it receives vital nourishment from our connection with others.
