Review: ‘Collective Rage’ is ‘The Vagina Monologues’ Times 5

NEW YORK — If you’re wondering whether you’ll enjoy the revolution, Jen Silverman’s “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties,” which opened Wednesday night at the Lucille Lortel Theater in Manhattan, makes an excellent (and hilarious) test case.

The revolution I mean is the feminist one that has been rumbling, like a nascent earthquake, beneath the American theater for decades. In the past year, it feels as if it has finally struck, in the process swallowing up every worn-out assumption about casting, subject matter, programming, leadership, inclusion — and criticism.

You won’t get too much criticism from me. For all its political and aesthetic cred, the MCC Theater production is entirely a delight, as long as you don’t mind hearing a certain feline term for vagina repeated about a thousand times. (A thousand and one times, if you count the elaborate sub-subtitle.) This is the kind of play in which even the projected descriptions between scenes have punch lines; they are both Brechtian and borschtian.

On paper, “Collective Rage” — starting with that phrase — may seem to favor alienation over amelioration. It offers, as promised, five women named Betty, whom we get to know by number. Their stories play out in various permutations across 19 scenes in a scheme that seems almost algebraic.

Betty 1 (Dana Delany) is an uptight socialite with a cheating husband and an unexamined inner life. What’s unexamined for Betty 2 (Adina Verson) is more tangible; she is horrified by the prospect of looking at, let alone touching, her genitals. Betty 3 (Ana Villafañe) is an exuberantly “high-femme super queer” celebrity, or will be just as soon as she quits her job at Sephora and develops a talent beyond hotness. At a dinner party, she rocks Betty 2’s world by giving her a hand mirror, with instructions on where to aim it.

But “butch as you can get” Betty 4 (Lea DeLaria) is frightened by Betty 3’s ambitions, especially if it means that her old pal (and crush) will leave her even further behind. She discusses these feelings, gruffly and obliquely, with Betty 5 (Chaunté Wayans), while the two work on their trucks together. Betty 5, who describes herself as “a gender-nonconforming masculine-presenting female-bodied individual,” yet “comfortable with female pronouns,” runs a boxing gym where she meets, you guessed it, Betty 1.

If this makes you think of the circularity of “La Ronde” while also recalling “The Vagina Monologues,” you’re only partway through the thicket of the play’s theatrical references. Silverman’s master template is the “Pyramus and Thisbe” plot from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which Betty 3 decides to stage as a step toward her stardom. Before you quite realize the resonances, she has cast the other Betties as Moonshine, Lion, Wall and Prologue: the gender-rainbow equivalent of Shakespeare’s rude mechanicals. (Betties 4 and 5 are, after all, tinkerers.) In a series of woeful rehearsals, they “devise” their own take on this play-within-the-play, which Betty 3 thinks is called “Burmese and Frisbee” or “Pyramid and Thursday.”

Some of this, it must be said, relies on sitcom-style satire, the kind that exploits, however sympathetically, a manufactured gap between the characters’ intelligence and the audience’s. For a play set now, in New York City, the Betties are curiously incurious, as if Ms. magazine and “Our Bodies, Ourselves” never happened. (Betty 2 reads Ladies’ Home Journal.) They are funny because they are working out ideas the rest of us imagine we mastered long ago.

But that’s exactly how Shakespeare used the “Midsummer” mechanicals — and to make the same point: Besides humor, there are beauty and power in the emergence of a new sensibility. As the Betties help one another grow past their imposed limitations, whether cultural, sexual, marital or otherwise, they are creating, even within a spoof, solidarity.

Silverman quite consciously connects that idea to the exploratory nature of theater. The phrase “collective rage,” she tells us in one of the scene titles, means not just women’s fury but constructive craziness, as in a rehearsal. This puts a lot of pressure on the actual production to serve as a case in point.

Happily, it does. Under the confident direction of Mike Donahue, who also staged Silverman’s plays “The Roommate” and “The Moors,” this is a trenchant and snappy production; even the props — which drop out of the egg-crate ceiling of Dane Laffrey’s set — get laughs. The best revolutions are, after all, clear of purpose and expertly timed.

The same could be said of the cast, which radiates the kind of gusto that actors working with enjoyable material don’t need to fake. For Delany, best known for her television roles, that may partly reflect the pleasure of rediscovering the stage in a role that is itself about self-rediscovery. DeLaria (“Orange Is the New Black”) and Wayans ground “Collective Rage” in their own lived experience and give it a hit of butch realness.

But Villafañe, who played Gloria Estefan in the musical “On Your Feet,” and Verson, so affecting in “Indecent” and “The Lucky Ones,” steal the show together by grabbing it from opposite ends. Villafañe achieves full manic liftoff upon her first entrance and never crashes down, elevating what could be a stereotype into an archetype. Verson digs in the other direction; she is somehow radiantly pathetic as a woman who can’t find herself under her skin.

One of the things I liked most about “Collective Rage” is that it does not apologize for its exclusive focus on the lives of these Betties; rather, it assumes the sympathy of audiences who do not check the same demographic boxes. Not long ago, that assumption might not have been rewarded — or producers, fearful that it wouldn’t be, might have declined to find out. But with a top-notch production of “Dangerous House” at the Williamstown Theater Festival in August, this has been a great year for Silverman — and for many other playwrights sending dispatches from the frontiers of feminism, orientation, gender identity and intersectionality.

Still, “Collective Rage,” first produced in 2016 by Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington, showed up on the MCC schedule only after the company severed ties with Neil LaBute, its long-standing playwright in residence. (The premiere of his play “Reasons to Be Pretty Happy” was canceled.) No explanation has ever been given for this turn of events, but I can’t say I regret it. “Collective Rage” is itself a reason to be pretty happy.

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Production Notes:

“Collective Rage:A Play in 5 Betties”

Through Oct. 7 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, mcctheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

Cast: Dana Delany, Lea DeLaria, Adina Verson, Ana Villafañe and Chaunté Wayans.