Love and a Major Organ

Or: We All Do Dumb Things, Organ Theft Doesn’t Have To Be One Of Them.

People do crazy things when we fall in love. We invent grand tapestries from the finest scraps, enter into bizarre destructive euphorias, and sometimes give vital parts of ourselves to the objects of our affection, such a trust, or a major organ. Leastways, that’s what becomes of The Subway Rider (Juanita Andersen) when she falls for the sad and mysterious George (Sarah Price) on her morning commute. George’s careful and plastic wrapped existence, in orbit of her mother Mona (Lynn Allison), is slowly unpacked and then strewed around the city as the Subway Rider sends tendrils into her cracks, glances, and conversations, and gifts of cassette tapes, until she, and her mother both, find themselves pried apart and naked to a whole new way of life.

Written by Julian Lederer, Love and a Major Organ is Ruhly as all get out. A line from the Rider’s ongoing confessions includes, “I’m afraid my feelings are like lice for which there is no special shampoo. They’ve hatched, and my only hope is that you are itchy too.” The script abounds with an Australia’s worth of weird marsupial similes and metaphors, delighting the ear and imagination with unexpected forms of linguistic life. It may lean a little heavily on social media savviness than is strictly necessary, and runs a distinct risk of turning its performers into the unfortunate souls that populate late night infomercials, who cannot find the right Tupperware top to save their lives and topple in a thrash of limbs and wild despair: forgetting the character in favor or the quirk. But yet the charm of the whole enterprise, the humor wrapped around the sharp truth, floats us up like a hot air balloon; transporting us so that we can look down on the fields of Bakereseque nuance cut by the creeks of Ruhlian theatricality.

We begin with Allison telling us a story, (set to the tripping harps and hesitant hopes of composer Riley Anne Johnson, whose score will massage and soothe us along on this jouncing subway ride) who's clear and steady crafting of her tale of the girl with a paper heart, and the exactitude in her disquiet throughout her own transformation, adds a much-appreciated dash of salt to the proceedings. Her brusque disinterest in whimsy is braised by a marvelous instinct for the grand; batting her lines high into the air with the grace of tennis champion then nonchalantly tossing off a salute to the heavens with her wine glass. Anderson by contrast, touches Lederer’s battery directly to her tongue, exuding a boundless energy and sharp mind of physical comedy, the delights of the extreme, relishing the rich chocolate extravagance of her poetry, sliding around subway pools in Dick Tracyish observations and hoiking her mutinous limbs into order. Her portrayal of the Rider is like that of a psilocybin-rich mushroom who’s spores have finally found fertile ground and have sprung up in a multitude of fruiting bodies; burgeoning, dying, and reviving again. Price, condemned by George’s position as an object: crystal enhanced daughter or black jacketed transport love, isn’t given all that much to play with, but makes the best with it, with a shy, back-stepping manner that flashes into grand gestures of passion and pointed pokes.

Across a rather opulent gnarl of a city, we see connections form, snarl, and untangle, while the characters freeze up into robotic stillness or melt into icicles of ecstasy. It’s a trip, but it’s a trip that’s well guided and takes no turn into the truly terrifying, conjures eruptions of laughter at matters both surreal and sharply true, and even offering the more than occasional moment of tenderness and delight. But more than delight us, and show off its collected talents, Love and a Major Organ provides a balm of forgiveness for anything you might have done in the grip of a desiring heart.