House Plant is a mind-numbingly supercilious play by Sarah Einspanier. During the huh-wha? production’s 80 or so minutes Emma Ramos as June, Ugo Chukwu as Max, and Molly Bernard as Chloe caper downstage on Meredith Ries’ virtually all-white set—that lighting designer Cha See occasionally turns spring-leaf green—while Deepali Gupta as Agnes inhabits an upper-level upstage area.
When the dizzying piece gets underway June and Max have been together for seven years, but she’s feeling the urge to break up. She declares, ”I want to be on tv.” So in hot pursuit of her dream, she trots off to Hollywood, where she disappears for much of the action. Rather quickly she gets to star in—and produce—an ER/Chicago Hope/Grey’s Anatomy hospital series.
Left behind, Max decides his heart’s desire is climbing to the summit of an Andes mountain. Instead of going to Peru, however, he opts to ascend in virtual fashion, establishing his endeavor in a blog—or is it a video blog (vlog, perhaps needless to say)—for which he acquires a smattering of followers. Eventually, he makes his living-room trek in a fire-engine-red puffer outfit with artificial wind effects attacking him. (Haydee Zelideth is the costume designer.)
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★ review here.]
In the meantime, Chloe, good friend to June but not a Max favorite, has moved into the June-Max flat. She’s an artist of one sort or another whose projects apparently vary. Though she doesn’t cotton to describing them to Max, at one point she does confide that “I’m interested in the banality of the body.” At another, she explains to him that she’s recording “the sound of a peach pit going in and out of an anus.” This, in a piece that Einspanier evidently doesn’t intend to be a satire.
For her part, Agnes, a musician, sits at a desk, breathing words like “sounds” and “inhalation” into a mic. Occasionally she bows a violin and tickles an electric keyboard. It’s she who provides the above-mentioned wind effect—and, as Gupta, the original music.
Einspanier unleashes so much rampant silliness in the time she’s allotted herself that it’s difficult to know what she’s getting at. It may be that she’s about the same age as her twentysomething-thirtysomething characters and wants to comment on their vague (and vacuous?) ambitions for themselves.
More specifically, she looks to be exposing a romantic triangle in which Max and June decide on a temporary separation with reunion in mind. It doesn’t cross their minds that during their television season apart Max and Chloe—in each other’s face and in each other’s way on a daily basis—might slowly bond and leave the returning June out in the cold.
One hardly missable House Plant aspect is the overacting in which Ramos, Chukwu, and Bernard indulge from the second they hit the stage. Their impetus might be to make something in any manner they can of an opaque script. Or it may be that they’re simply seizing the opportunity to show off what they think of as their talents. To be sure, when this brand of excessive histrionics is afoot, a director must shoulder plenty of the blame. The guilty party is Jaki Bradley.
By the way, there are a couple of sequences where bad acting is part of the plot. They’re prime examples of the pot calling the kettle black and involve scenes from June’s series. Ramos as June is shown in scrubs poking fun at the kind of television performing that may have never existed.
As for Einspanier’s title: A house plant of unspecified genus and species sits atop a table where June, Max, and Chloe do much of their frenetic stage business, often consulting computer screens. As the denouement approaches, a female voiceover speaks as the plant and declares that she enjoys thriving inside rather than flourishing outdoors. She likes being seen to by nice people. Were she to be cared for by bores, she, of course, couldn’t escape. Luckily, audience members can.
