Try to keep up with this elite dark comedy
You might think you’ve seen a breakneck pace in theater before. But the clip at which Jiehae Park’s “peerless” sprinted into its Tuesday, March 14, opening at Marin Theatre Company should make you rethink the very concept of speed on stage.
Part of the thrill of the opening exchanges between high school student twin sisters M (Tiffany Villarin) and L (Rinabeth Apostol) is their sheer athleticism. Wearing adorable matching outfits by costume designer Sydney Gallas, the performers, in collaboration with director Margot Bordelon, make a ballet out of overlapping whirlwind dialogue, interrupted suddenly, periodically, by an emphatic pause — but one that lasts only a half-breath.
The astonishing momentum of this West Coast premiere isn’t just spectacle. It adroitly encapsulates, as few contemporary plays have dared to, the extraordinary pressures on elite students in elite high schools seeking scarce spots in elite universities. Tempting as it is to write off college application woes as divertissement for the bourgeoisie, the process as a whole manifests all too starkly a peculiarly American sickness — one that has already plagued Bay Area high schools, notably in the South Bay, where a teen suicide epidemic rampages.
The world of “peerless” is one in which college admissions envelopes rocket out of the heavens like meteors and land onstage with a great, violent thwack. It’s a world where one might restructure one’s whole life, moving to a particular state (to enhance one’s “geographic diversity,” in the play’s sad but pragmatic parlance), attending a particular high school, participating in particular extracurricular activities, all in effort to game a pernicious system, one that somehow we’ve all agreed to accept.
Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and the story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, Britain’s “silent twins,” inspired Park’s writing, but she transforms those dark sources into zippy comedy (with plenty of Scottish Play references for theater insiders to feast on). As M, the sister who occasionally feels a pang of conscience, Villarin has a default look of eyes stretched so wide you can almost see eyeball veins you’re not supposed to see. This is a student, her performance conveys, so accustomed to prying her eyelids open to cram for AP exams that when her ambition escapes her for a moment, she’s no more than a deer in the headlights. As the more barbarous L, Apostol savors her bloodthirsty lines; it’s as if, in merely speaking, she’s already devouring her planned victim.
That victim is D, performed with showstopping flair by Jeremy Kahn. Even if Kahn weren’t in the show, “peerless” would still be much-needed catharsis for any parents and students afflicted by the college admissions process; Kahn’s performance elevates the play higher still. He makes D so overwhelmingly geeky that you worry the character’s aura will somehow come out into the audience and accidentally hurt you. He might whack you with his “fat hands” during an especially maladroit dance move at the school’s “Hoopcoming” dance or stab you with the EpiPen he carries around his neck. And each time you think D has reached his feverish peak, Kahn charts a new comedic height.
If the show has any flaw, it’s that D’s scenes come midway through the play, and they’re impossible to top. Yet in its downtempo denouement, “peerless” makes its most sobering point. Scholar Jan Kott once wrote that “Macbeth” is driven by a false dream, “of a murder that will break the murder cycle, will be the way out of nightmare, and will mean liberation.” Part of the point of “peerless” is that even if you get into your top college, the rat race doesn’t stop there; one race bloodily won breeds only further races to run.