Revealing study of bugs — and love
Stage chemistry is a kind of love. It’s more than timing and understanding, more than openness and commitment. When scene partners have that special magic, it’s because, on some level, they seek out and rejoice in each other’s company almost as paramours do.
That’s even if they’ve never actually been lovers, or it’s been years since they were, as in the opening scenes of “An Entomologist’s Love Story,” which made its world premiere Tuesday, May 15, at San Francisco Playhouse.
American Museum of Natural History entomologists Betty (Lori Prince) and Jeff (Lucas Verbrugghe) haven’t dated since college, but they still lust after rapport with one another. Rarely have two characters so longed to tease and be teased by one another, to razz each other for wearing “skidmarked boxers,” for trying eHarmony, for loving the music of Ani DiFranco.
Director Giovanna Sardelli makes the early scenes of Melissa Ross’ script dance: the way caster chairs sail back and forth across the pair’s creepycrawly-bedecked lab (Nina Ball did the set design); the way a gibe from Prince’s Betty can make Verbrugghe’s Jeff launch into an air guitar solo; the way Prince’s voice both plumbs gravelly depths and ascends squeaky heights in effort to land on, for a particular moment’s needs, just the right register with which to lambaste Jeff ’s adorable geekiness.
If it’s a long-lasting equilibrium, where Jeff and Betty are each other’s everything —coworkers and best friends with a lingering flicker of carnal attraction — it’s also an easily upset one when new love interests enter the scene. For Betty, that’s Andy (Will Springhorn Jr.), a janitor she meets on a park bench. For Jeff, it’s Lindsay ( Jessica Lynn Carroll), the type who bakes her new boyfriend cookies, calls him six times a day and wonders, quite seriously, why women can’t just get married and have kids instead of having careers.
Ross’ script falters in pitting Lindsay against Betty, positing notions of femininity as blackand-white and as retrograde as those in Woody Allen’s “Husbands and Wives.” Smart women are ball-breakers who, as Lindsay puts it, must “make an executive decision to pretend to be dumber” than they actually are. “Men like dumb girls, or girls who play dumb,” she adds.
In case you didn’t deduce where in that dichotomy the women of “Entomologist’s Love Story” fall, Brooke Jennings’ costume design tripleunderlines the point, giving Betty black nail polish and a purple streak in her hair, while Lindsay gets saddle shoes, a pixie cut and outfits that wouldn’t look out of place in “Dick and Jane” books.
The characters are all stunted, having somehow made it to their mid-30s without conquering adolescent heebie-jeebies at the prospect of a first date, without having learned that the way out of awkwardness is to do anything — truly anything — but acknowledge one’s awkwardness and then keep on acknowledging it for a few more minutes. But if you can accept that reality, Sardelli creates the kind of tension that makes scenes feel fragile, delicate. You want to suppress your cringes of recognition and revulsion, lest your slightest stir should make these congenital nerds give up on words and just collapse in a fit of flailings and spasms.
Ultimately “Entomologist’s Love Story” is more of a coming-of-age story than love story. Lindsay and Jeff might be fully grown adults with doctorates, but they have yet to learn what they want in love and define for themselves a relationship for which existing labels aren’t adequate — not merely exes nor friends nor office mates. Their pathos is that their fondness and intuitive understanding dictate that they must be still more, yet the exigencies of adult relationships dictate boundaries.
Insect taxonomy is a lot easier. But we’re not totally unlike fireflies, as the show’s lovely last scene points out — blinking our lights into the abyss and hoping some mate emerges to blink back.