Going on a bad date is painful, but going on someone else’s bad date is excruciating. And if you’ve ever been to a tiny New York City elbow-bumping restaurant where you can overhear every single word from the adjacent table, you know what I’m talking about. The first scene of Halley Feiffer’s emotionally incendiary The Pain of My Belligerence, now at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater, puts you right in the middle of a horrific date between bright, vulnerable writer Cat (Feiffer) and the narcissistic, voracious restauranteur Guy (Hamish Linklater). The conversation is constant, and the chemistry is there—Feiffer and Linklater are breathlessly good together—but believe me when I tell you it will take every ounce of your self-restraint to avoid running up on stage and throttling that douchebag Guy.
First, he wears her down with platitudes such as “How are you still single?” and “You’re very beautiful.” Then he (jokingly, he says) calls her racist—because she wondered, logically, why an upscale Japanese restaurant is adorned with imported Italian marble. “I had a concept for the place—you can see it, can’t you?” he expounds. “A sort of Osaka-meets-Fellini-in-the-’60s vibe? Shinto-shrine-airdropped-inside-the-Duomo-on-an-acid-trip kind of feel.” Cat is attempting to have a conversation with her pretentious companion, but he’d prefer to soliloquize: “Can’t you let a guy tell a goddamn story?” He relates extremely personal details about his wife and restaurant partner, Yuki (Vanessa Kai)—who he insists didn’t reach the pinnacle of her culinary fame until he came on board. He plainly, and proudly, calls himself “arrogant,” “a monster,” “a serial killer,” and “profoundly mentally ill.” He bites Cat’s bare shoulder. His idea of a compliment is “You’re prettier when you don’t talk.” Yet there Cat sits, merely giggling—nervously, and probably involuntarily—at all of his outrageousness. She’s even moving closer to him. So why, why, why for the love of all that is good and holy doesn’t she run screaming from this pompous windbag?
[Read Jesse Oxfeld’s ★★ review here.]
The one decent thing Guy manages to do for Cat is find the tick burrowing into her neck. The fact that he (ick) sucks it out, however, seems like another reason to get as far away as possible from this predator. But not apparently for Cat.
Four years later, they’re still together and he’s as conceited as ever—though Cat has lost her spark, her energy, and even her job to Lyme disease. Which Guy finds a huge turn-on, naturally. “You look really fucking sexy when you’re sick,” he says. Or maybe it’s her weakness and complete and utter dependency that he finds sexy.
A person has no control over Lyme disease, as Feiffer herself knows. But she should be able to control the amount of time she spends with repulsive, manipulative men. I’m finding myself irrationally angry with Cat for not summoning the strength to leave a destructive, verbally abusive lover who likes that her muscles have atrophied and enjoys making her hate herself. So what if he brings her bath bombs? Or maybe I’m just mad at Feiffer—a whip-smart playwright with the best titles in the business (her previous works include I’m Gonna Pray For You So Hard, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City, and How to Make Friends and Then Kill Them)—for showing me just a tiny bit of myself in her character. Along with the oral tick extraction, that’s something I never expected to see.
The Pain of My Belligerence opened April 22, 2019, at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater and runs through May 12. Tickets and information: playwrightshorizons.org
