Patient: The Lesbian Play, by Riley McCarthy [Dr. 2's Diagnosis]

Patient: The Lesbian Play

Parents: Riley McCarthy

Insurance: PagePay Plus

Symptoms: guns, lipstick, sass, ass

Diagnosis: Nuts

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Bio:

Riley McCarthy is a recent graduate from the Marymount Manhattan College. Their plays draw out the conflicts and differing interests between the colors of the QLGBT rainbow. McCarthy's plays have had live performances at the Hudson Guild Theater and the Marymount Manhattan College.

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Patient Description:

Before this play, I was never informed that the politically correct term for lesbian is "vagitarian." The Lesbian Play is a kinda-definitive guide on the art of women, loving women.

Club president Mimi is getting ready for a special meeting at their college’s Women Loving Women club. Laurel helps prepare the party for member Beatrice’s surprise birthday party. One by one, the lady-loving members step in, eager to surprise Beatrice before Beatrice surprises them:

Beatrice comes out to everyone as a non-binary member of the Women Loving Women club.

We join the college party to drop in on typical lesbian irreverence: chick talk without boundaries, heavy liquor, and weed-smokey f-bombs. McCarthy’s characters are unstoppable from the start: with jokes that are timely—and actually funny. The banter amongst fellow lesbs is true, college level, lesbiology.

Play quality got kinky during its polarizing debates on gay authenticity, female authenticity, versus QLGBT diversity. I was hardly enriched or convinced by any single line from any single character. 

Mimi is a straw (wo)man who barks her concerns to her Women Loving Women club. The club barks back. Beez is coming out as non-binary. That mere fact meanders throughout the story without much competition. The playwright is young, but apparently winning public praise for being an effective QLGBT voice. 

Brute authenticity and black nail polish bring this play to life. Without fruitful dialectics, however, this play is a political rant that’s all puckered up with not much to say.

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Recently Healed Patients

Patient Refugee Rhapsody, by Yussef El Guindi, Dr. 2's Diagnosis

Patient: Refugee Rhapsody

Parents: Yussef El Guindi

Insurance: Paperkutz

Symptoms: star-struck, poverty-stricken

Diagnosis: It came from the bargain bin.

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Bio:

Playwright Yussef El Guindi won the American Blues Theater, Blue Ink Award for 2021. Out of 820 submissions, it's hard to imagine how poor the runner ups were if Guindi was the paid champion. The American Blues Theater should be charged a fine by the drama police for quadruple the amount, under the charges of praising false talent.

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Patient Description:

Sakinah and Fouad are callused lovers, working at the second-hand shop, Goodwill. One fateful day, they stumble upon some fancy dresses that turn out to belong to a local aristocrat, Emily. Emily voices sympathy and action for the current affairs of the Middle East at one of her parties. Sakinah and Fouad crash one of these parties—with Fouad in drag—wearing one of Emily's old dresses found at Goodwill.

The party was over quick. Emily is an impossibly magnanimous white devil, while Fouad is the starving, kicked puppy she's been looking to nurse into a show dog. Guindi intended to portray this personality contrast, but both characters are saccharine off the charts: Emily breastfeeding Fouad thousand dollar caviar along Fouad's simpleton monologues of gratitude. 

It was a consistent cringefest. I literally just kept cringing and cringing and cringing, every time Fouad congratulated Emily on being rich, and when Emily apologized for it. These characters had zero impact.

The play script had a horrible case of the maybies in the directing parentheticals. (X and Y do Z—maybe?) (Lights dim for X's entrance—maybe?)

The only character of merit is Sakinah. She's used to a hard life; so she was pre-conditioned to handle the story's rigor. She stands in-between the two worlds Guindi means to collide: the irreverent white world that knows nothing of third world suffering, and the scrappy world itself that prefers not to talk about it at glamorous fundraising parties. 

For a play that attempts to mock racial fawning from white America, Guindi is ironically his own target. There is nothing more than faint mentions of Middle Eastern struggles that have brought this incomplete play to an adoring limelight. What is there to observe, in a play merely requesting we observe?

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