In ‘Scissoring,’ Visits From Ghosts of a Closeted Past

NEW YORK — In a classroom at an all-girls Roman Catholic high school in New Orleans, the ghost of Lorena Hickok surveys the situation. A journalist, she was Eleanor Roosevelt’s devoted friend and quite possibly her great love. If their relationship was a romance — and in Christina Quintana’s bittersweet new comedy “Scissoring,” it was indeed — it remained as hidden from the public as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wheelchair.

Lorena (Marie Louise Guinier), one of a small herd of hallucinations that have begun appearing to a history teacher named Abigail (Vanessa R. Butler), appraises Abigail’s life with a cool but sympathetic eye. In love with an artist named Josie, and happily out just a few months back, Abigail scrambled into the closet the moment she was hired by the school’s strait-laced principal (Kim Brockington).

“I knew what I was doing when I took this job,” Abigail insists to the apparition. But Lorena scoffs, recognizing what she sees: a woman who’s selling her own worth short — and detonating a precious relationship. Josie, understandably, is not keen on pretending that she’s Abigail’s roommate. “It’s like a sleepover every night, right, Ab?” Josie (Ashley Marie Ortiz) says when she meets Abigail’s colleague Celia (Christy Escobar), who is less naïve than she seems.

Directed by Estefanía Fadul at Intar Theater, “Scissoring” (the title refers to a sexual position) is about finding the courage to be fully oneself — a task complicated, for Abigail, by her Catholicism. As she sorts out her ambitions, desires and entrenched shame, her union with the church is one more relationship to navigate.

Growing up in New Orleans, she went to Catholic school, and that milieu feels like home to her. To return to it, and sidestep its homophobia, she’s willing to sacrifice part of her essential self. Thus the psychic turmoil and resultant visions, a few of which — including retired Pope Benedict XVI — are embodied by the excellent Ryan Vincent Anderson (impressively abetted by Heather McDevitt Barton’s costumes and Fan Zhang’s sound design).

“Scissoring” was Quintana’s thesis in the MFA playwriting program at Columbia University, and it bears some hallmarks of a grad-school play: a relatively large cast, which in this well balanced production is a pleasure to watch; occasional lapses into authorial argument; and an awkward ending that’s too easy to anticipate. The play made me eager to see what Quintana will do next, but it also left me wondering about Abigail’s (unseen) family and childhood friends, some of them presumably still in the city. How much do they have to do with her longing for Catholic community?

Catholics, of course, are not Abigail’s only community. Lesbians and intellectuals are her people, too. For role models, she turns to Lorena and the aristocratic Eleanor (Elise Santora). The former first lady knows how to be unapologetically selfish — and compartmentalize like a pro.

“How did you do it, Eleanor?” Abigail asks. “You had so many separate lives.”

“One does what one must,” Eleanor says. “It wasn’t hard.”

Lorena, though, is having none of it. “It was damned hard,” she says. And you know she wants better for Abigail than she had for herself.

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Event Information:

“Scissoring”

Through Saturday at Intar Theater, Manhattan; 212-352-3101, intartheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.