What some people won’t do to get into the college of their choice, especially if they suspect a quota for minority applicants!
For a striking example, give a gander at identical Asian twins L (Shannon Tyo) and M (Sasha Diamond) in Jiehae Park’s all lower-case peerless. Does having trouble with upper-case letters hold the 17-year-olds back. No, that doesn’t seem to be their hang-up.
Rather, they’re so concerned about the single slot available to them that L has consented to slip down a grade below M. The idea is that then both M and she will nail the college acceptance from their high school in successive years.
Nonetheless, there are rivals, like D (Benny Wayne Sully), an excitable M classmate, who has a Native American Indian background and possibly stands steadfastly in their way.
During the 1940s and 1950s, when actresses played twins (say, Bette Davis in A Stolen Life and Dead Ringer), the joke went that there was one good and one bad—the exception being Betty Hutton who when playing twins, presented one good and one loud.
In peerless, M in red headband and L in yellow headband fit the one-good-one-bad category. Kind of. M is the somewhat good twin, her foul mouth notwithstanding. L is the bad twin, the more habitually conniving of the pair. Together they’re so determined to succeed—despite M’s not having perfect scores on her senior-year record—that they decide homicide is the only reliable strategy for receiving the oh-so-anticipated “We are pleased to inform you…” letter.
As their modus operandi is poison, they’re following a sturdy tradition, It’s Agatha Christie’s frequent murder weapon as well as S. S. Van Dine’s choice in The Casino Murder Mystery, one of his dozen Philo Vance collection. Dispensing their concoction, two schoolmates, D (Benny Wayne Sully) and BF (Anthony Cason), M’s boyfriend, fall victim to the fatal digestible and potable edibles.
Perhaps this is the place to bring up that old, unofficial theater rule that goes: Whenever playwrights use letters, numbers, or words like “He” and “She” instead of names to designate characters, it’s a safe bet that a pretentious manuscript is at hand.
It almost never fails, and peerless fits the bill. Park does go on and on with the tedious L and M exploits, from time to time sending out a character called Dirty Girl (Mariè Botha), the work’s only sorta name. Dirty Girl, with wild blonde hair and soiled raffish outfits, intros the proceeding. Sometimes she talks, sometimes not. She constantly menaces.
At an intermissionless 80 minutes, peerless is too long—or would be if Park’s sketch-like play (a macabre comedy?) hasn’t been so well mounted by director Margot Bordelon. It’s almost as if, confronting the script, she realized she’d have to manifest all manner of skills to rush audiences past the heated but thin material.
She’s started her achievements—on Kristen Robinson’s well-thought-out set—with Diamond and Tyo. Wearing Amanda Gladu’s matching or complimentary costumes, they look remarkably alike but are apparently not related. Shortly after Mextly Couzin’s have lights gone up, they’re centerstage rapidly beginning and ending each other’s sentences.
Bordelon has drilled them so well that the peerless kick-off is something of a tour de force. Diamond and Ryo continue neatly working off each other. As the sisters slowly lose trust in each other (Michael Rossmy is the fight director)—it may be that the two actors have come to believe they were sibs in a previous life.
Sully’s D is another tour de force outing. Though evidently brilliant, the figure is also a constantly fulminating fool. He’s a schoolboy so awkwardly gesticulating with practically every phrase that he’s turned himself into a laughingstock. While allowing D barely time to breathe, Sully is likely to have audiences also peerlessly breathless. The hyperkinetic Sully also pulls off a (spoiler alert) death scene.
Botha’s mean and yowling Dirty Girl locks attention whenever she enters from the wings or returns to them. That makes it all the more impressive when she shows up as Preppy Girl, a Wasp-type beauty whom every campus sorority longs to pledge. Cason’s doomed BF has his equally impressive moments.
There is another sort of plus to the peerless arrival. The concurrence of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements has happily resulted in many BIPOC productions gracing recent and now incoming theater seasons. The situation must be encouraging to playwrights of all backgrounds. Park and others know to keep going—and, in all cases, heading towards something potentially better and better each time out.
Yet one more reason to take in peerless is its giving stage time to the increasingly pressing topic of affirmative action, now on the radical Supreme Court 2022-23 docket. Thanks to Park for pointing an accusatory dramatic finger at that dicey matter.
peerless opened October 11, 2022, at 59E59 and runs through November 6. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
