Review: ‘Fruit Trilogy,’ Eve Ensler’s New Show, Brims With Outrage

NEW YORK — Eve Ensler’s new show, “Fruit Trilogy,” ends with a woman alone onstage at the Lucille Lortel Theater, jubilant and nearly naked. She is no sylph, no ingénue, yet there she is in nothing but a pair of purple underpants, exulting in her physicality as an audience looks on.

It’s a feminist tableau, defying body-shaming and staking a claim to corporeal pleasure — which makes it a politically powerful statement, and the high point of a program of three short plays in which political messaging is paramount. Because the performer, Liz Mikel, is warm and funny and absolutely owns that stage, it’s an artistically successful moment as well.

But a curious flatness pervades most of “Fruit Trilogy,” a two-hander directed by Mark Rosenblatt for Abingdon Theater Company. Brimming with outrage at sex trafficking and other forms of violence against women, Ensler’s script requires delicate handling so that the women in these plays come across as people, not social problems cloaked in dramatic form.

Rosenblatt too often goes for bluntness where nuance is needed, which gets in the way of human connection. So does the almost unrelenting tonal darkness of the first two plays, making them seem less like a protest against women’s victimization than a fetishization of it. The laughter that is such a subversive part of “The Vagina Monologues,” the play that vaulted Ensler to fame in the 1990s, is largely absent here — though there’s more of it in the “Fruit Trilogy” script than in the performance.

“Pomegranate,” the program’s first play, presents a pair of talking heads debating their situation. Ensler calls them Item 1 ( Mikel) and Item 2 (Kiersey Clemons), but actually they are women for sale. Illuminated (by the reliably excellent Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew) on an otherwise blacked-out set (by Mark Wendland), these heads are all we see: their hair and makeup in bright candy colors (costumes are by Andrea Lauer), their facial expressions mindlessly pleasant whenever a man comes near.

In subject matter, it’s not much different from the second play, “Avocado,” a long monologue set in a shipping container, where a young woman (Clemons) is stowed away. (Weirdly, the staging conveys no sense of movement.) Forced into prostitution as a child, and now escaped, she is on her way to “a country called Asylum” — a place that has “bells and towers and jobs and coffees with sugar,” she says. “This is why I chose this box. Why I got in. Why I chose this cage over the cage of being caught.” “Avocado” loses focus and comes close to ranting as it goes on, and the likable Clemons, who is primarily a screen actress (and co-stars with Nick Offerman in the just-released indie film “Hearts Beat Loud”), can’t obscure those pitfalls. Something similar happens in “Pomegranate,” when the text becomes didactic and the humanity bleeds away.

The final piece, “Coconut,” comes as a relief with its spalike ambience, all candles and body oil. Even with Mikel’s centering presence, though, this play, too, spins out, primarily into New Agey self-indulgence. It also repeats a trick from Ensler’s recent solo show, “In the Body of the World,” ordering the spectators to their feet to dance.

But as a play about self-care and honoring the female body, “Coconut” makes an uplifting finish to a grim program. And laughter, that vital survival mechanism, whooshes in like oxygen.

—

Event Information:

‘Fruit Trilogy’

Through Saturday at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, abingdontheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.