Perfect Little You

A new play by Caitlin Turnage

Or: Blessed be the gears that link.

A girl, fourteen years old. Girl under high pressure from father. Girl with unconventional, disapproved of passion. Girl meets rival. Taunts are exchanged. Blows are exchanged. Something blossoms from the animosity, the promise of something better than anything known before. The girl is Lemon (Bella Hall), the father is Larry (Jared Still). The pressure is her upcoming Purity Ball (Know those? It’s where everyone dresses up modestly and pledges their virginity to J-sus. Fun times.) The Passion is Battle Bots, not of the rock em sock em variety, but the build your own-attach axes-fight to the death type. Not the done thing for a young Christian girl. The rival is Jo (Tacet Bunk, current front-runner for the Aven Hemshel Memorial Nifty Name Award of 2018), an even more brilliant Bot Battler and the schools resident gender queer and pariah.

Zany and heartfelt Caitlin Turnage’s Perfect Little You charges ahead full tilt, bouncing between the world of sugar-coated Christianity and therapy by bot destruction. Flowering with a dazzling bouquet of punch lines, the play not only offers a poignant introduction to a broader, non-binary world but also the soil Lemon is raised from: not demonized but obviously weird and downright harmful. This latter is superbly summed up not by Larry (a character in need of further tune-up, too fun to jive with his worldview, and too absorbed for their to be a believable chance of coming round) but for Michael (Lawrence Cook), the arranged marriage, er, date picked out for Lemmon by the powers that be. Michael is dear, deliciously awkward, and capable of a fine dry line himself (and Lawrence does so with precision, both with the light one-ups and the multitude of glorious failings his playwright presents him with). But he can also toss off the most horrifying presumptions as though remarking on the state of the roads. That’s the way the world is for some people.

Fortunately, such an acidic garden can produce great zest. Turnage’s Lemon is both tart and zesty, and Hall has a blast juggling all the smart-alecky antics of a fourteen-year-old, with all the wit and wisdom and capacity for compassion of a fourteen-year-old with a good writers room behind her. A speech where she compares the resistance against Jo (and her own feelings for them) to hammering gears to fit in your battle bot: they might mesh nicely together but they leave the whole dangerously unbalanced; you might just shake yourself to bits. She’s matched, touched, and raced around by Bunk’s luminous performance: wry, warm, full of righteousness and puckish anarchy (the delight taken in Jo’s theory and practice of disrespecting authority beggars description). As the two kids come close enough to hold hands and share sparks I wore out the patience of my seatmates with the little mouth sounds of worry or delight, uncertain whether this was headed for triumph of tragedy. But all throughout I was tickled pink by the exuberance and cleverness of this small Becoming story: coming of age and coming of enlightenment.