by Nicholas Whittaker
‘Move Your Face’ directed by Joey Frangieh, Assistant Direction by Amie Lytle. Set Design: Maggie Kiernan. Stage Manager: Audrey Seraphin. Lighting Design: Emily Bearce. Music: Nate Shaffer. Presented by the Boston Theater Company at the Boston Playwright’s Theater, 949 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA 02215.
Move Your Face is an exercise in caricature. It has to be; the play’s motivating conceit demands it. Move Your Face is a “wordless play”. After being fully scripted, each line was removed from the performance. In addition (an apparent paradox with the play’s name), each actor spends the entirety of the play (with one notable exception) wearing a brightly-colored mask. With two of the most important tools in an actor’s toolbox – facial expression or vocal inflection – stripped away, Move Your Face’s cast and creative team has to rely on movement, action, and visual spectacle to make its point. Unfortunately, the end result is a story mostly stripped of nuance and emotional specificity, relying on overly-broad strokes to make its point.
Move Your Face is the story of the romance between a nameless woman and man. The most intriguing part of this story is its opening movements. This romance begins on the dating app Tinder, promising an intriguingly updated take on the boy-meets-girl formula. But although this promise is continued with a first date that captures the specific kind of awkwardness that only a dating-app can bring, Move Your Face quickly lapses into a tried and true rom-com narrative which abandons the uniqueness the show’s original premise hinted at. Boy shows heartfelt side that girl falls for; boy remains a lovable doofus even after girl’s attempts at domestication; marriage brings out the worst of boy and girl; boy cheats; girl attempts to live life without boy.
None of these plot movements, on their own, spell disaster, and can prove to be compelling theater. Cliché can be made exciting, and caricature interesting. But unfortunately, Move Your Face is unable to seize on the interesting possibilities of its premise. This is largely despite, rather than because of, the cast. The five actors prove themselves game to invest in the movement work – sometimes hyper-exaggerated, other times subtly naturalistic – that must compensate for the lack of language. At times this provides for genuinely intriguing and exciting character work. Most prominently, Lindsay Eagle possesses an admirable understanding of her character – the main romantic interest – an understanding that sees the constraints of the production not as obstacles but opportunities. She embodies a careful and caring attention to her body and its movements, painting a truly touching image. The rest of the cast, though relying on more histrionic decisions that make difficult the gentler touches Eagle displays, are able to vividly capture a kinetic energy that keeps the show entertaining.
But these movements are all in service to a production that never uses them to reinvest new energy into the oft-told narrative it sells us. Perhaps most frustratingly, the story relies on reductive notions of gendered narrative and movement. The three women flash newly painted nails for an Instagram post and sip red wine in front of melodramas; the two men toss back protein powder and lazily lounge on the couch playing video games. When the two meet, the result is not only a stereotypical understanding of the show’s characters, but also a narrative weakness. The couple fight because the woman doesn’t understand why the man plays video games, or because he falls asleep at the theater, or because he doesn’t like to clean up, while he gets upset at her for missing driving directions and nagging him. When the marriage finally collapses, it feels hollow; not only because the final straw feels like a desperate reliance on a dangerously-close-to-sexist trope, but because it is only the last in a long line of unnecessarily gendered typecasts.
The point is not that the show is maliciously or dangerously “sexist”; the point is that gender tropes are part of its overall reliance on easy, dependable, and well-worn patterns of narrative and character. And the result is not just that the men and women reify outdated images of what men and women do and are, but that the play loses the cleverness and freshness that its premise promised. The characters are (barring the subtle work that its cast does to resurrect some nuance) caricatures of 20-something Guys and Girls, and the romance is an uncomplicated (and often uninteresting) story because the production feels afraid to take narrative and character risks beyond its formal adventures.
Move Your Face does not suffer for lack of talent. The set and lighting is gorgeously expressive, and while the live accompaniment is occasionally jarringly abstract, Nate Schaffer’s piano, guitar, and horn often provide the emotional nuance and heft the production needs. And it is worth noting that this is a preview performance, a year out from the production’s full premiere. Doubtless, character work (and hopefully narrative content) are thus still open to change.
As a test run, then, Move Your Face is in no way a waste of time. There is a truly special, cunning show waiting somewhere on that stage. At times, we were lucky enough to see it. When the couple go on their second date, we see a complex character work that had heretofore been missing. As they get up to walk together, holding hands for the first time, gesturing gently in a kind of mute conversation, I felt for the first time that the lack of dialogue was in no way a handicap. Rather than constantly trying to compensate for its self-imposed limits with gender caricature and giant genitalia and unwarranted plot twists, the show saw those limits as an opportunity to try something new, to get at an emotion that depended neither on clever dialogue nor on performative excess but on silence and simplicity. While they walked, a shadow fell across Eagle’s mask, running down from her cheek to her chin, and in that moment I could have sworn I saw those wooden lips move.
For tickets and more information, go to https://www.bostontheater.org/.
