Beauty on the Vine

The Clurman Theater

As a main theme, Beauty on the Vine explored the theme of our extraordinary individuality as human beings. Secondarily, it explored parenthood, mixed ethnicity, plastic surgery, teen angst, marriage, love and political affiliations.

The play, while nuanced and enjoyable, felt a little bit like every last idea the playwright ever had on the subject of individual identity was thrown into the play. The problem, though, is that both the play and the theme were complex and when presenting complex ideas I find that it is best to do it simply with structure and clear lines. The lines of the play were muddled in Beauty on the Vine. The acting was loose in style and pacing, instead of tight and compact. The play suffered from too many ideas, a loose style, a lack of coherent or tight structure, and a little too much complexity within that framework.

This is a story of a man who loses his semi-famous wife in a murder that slowly gets explained as the show progresses. Oddly, his loss turns up a woman who has had plastic surgery in her late teens to make her look exactly like the wife he just lost. And, there is not just one of them out there in the world; there is at least one more. She underwent plastic surgery with a friend. So, here we are faced with many, many questions:

• How does looking like someone and mimicking them change the person who is doing the copy work?

• How individual are we?

• Can we be copied?

• Should we all try to be like one another?

• What is the pressure placed on girl teens to be a certain way?

These questions don’t even begin to bring in the many subplots, and there are many. There is the father of the woman who was shot and he knows she was an original, one-of-a-kind. There is the mother of one of the women who got plastic surgery and I don’t want to spoil her import to the entire drama. And, there is a friend of the young husband who represents ongoing support and acceptance, liberalism and wants to get pregnant via sperm donor. It gets even murkier from here, but I’ll stop.

The acting was good enough, but the chemistry between all of the actors felt off. The sets were extremely well done, and it would be remiss of me to not say so. I liked them in the beginning, but the set kept revealing itself as more and more versatile and useful to the story throughout the show. Except for the sets, the show did not feel clean or have great edges. I don’t know how else to explain it.

I don’t think I would go back for more, and it hasn’t stayed with me as I thought it might. If you love to rage on about how unfair it is to be a teenage girl in America and all the pressure that women feel over their looks, then this is definitely the play for you. If you love themes like individualism and identity, you should probably see this. I didn’t mind the subject matter; I just wish it had been more constructively presented.