I’ve never been good with horror, even in its campier forms. I caught a single clip from The Silence of the Lambs decades ago and have never dared to watch the whole movie. In sixth grade, Sweeney Todd kept me awake for weeks. And a [cough] totally reasonable number of years ago, I made it 40 minutes into a movie called Teeth before I had to … extract myself. So, although my big-girl ego told me I’d be fine, it was still with some trepidation in my id that I took my seat for the new musical written by Anna K. Jacobs (book and music) and Michael R. Jackson (book and lyrics) based on that 2007 film I had never been able to finish. Then, the house lights smashed to black, the stage-wide banner emblazoned with the show’s name — splashed ominously with blood — fluttered to the ground, and it took all of 30 seconds to convert my nerves to excitement. Under Sarah Benson’s claws-out direction, Teeth feels like the musical equivalent of driving a spike-covered Mad Max car across the desert while getting chased by war boys on their way to Valhalla. It’s a rush — and it’s also a pitch-dark examination of the very real chokehold of Christofascist ideology in America.
The horror of Teeth functions on two levels: There are the gruesome events — which are enjoyably scary because they’re fantastical — and then there are the ideas, which are infinitely scarier because they’re anything but. We are in New Testament Village, a Christian community implicitly located somewhere in middle America, and our heroine, Dawn O’Keefe (the phenomenal Alyse Alan Louis), is shaken, because on her watch, as leader of the “Promise Keeper Girls,†one of their number has “let the Enemy corrupt her mind.†As the rabidly charismatic leader of Dawn’s congregation, known only as Pastor, Steven Pasquale couldn’t be better — square-jawed, wild-eyed, and gloriously unafraid of scenery-chomping, he’s in his element as he hollers into a handheld mic, “WOMAN? WHERE IS YOUR FIG LEAF? WOMAN? WHERE IS YOUR SHAME?!?†Dawn’s cohort, the “PKGs,†are a group of high-school girls who have all, in Pastor’s words, committed themselves to the “especially awesome message of female empowerment through sexual purity.†They wear the rings and walk the walk, and now they’re all on fire with divine judgment aimed at their former sister, the damningly absent Amy Sue Pearson. Why? “Because,†shouts Promise Keeper Girl Trisha (the wonderful Jenna Rose Husli), “Amy Sue got herself pregnant!†It’s perfectly phrased. Later we are told that Mary “got herself pregnant by Father God.â€
As Pastor rained down hellfire and the PKGs quivered in fearful ecstasy — while the boys in the congregation sat to attention in various states of torment — laugh after laugh poured out of my matinee audience. From me, too — Jacobs and Jackson’s book is immediately and consistently funny. Later, Dawn and her pious stud of a boyfriend, Tobey (Jason Gotay), share a duet called “Modest Is Hottest†that’s as excellent a piece of comic songwriting as I’ve heard in many a menstrual cycle. Still, I couldn’t help wondering whether the extremity of our glee arose from a New York crowd’s sense of ironic distance. It’s not an inappropriate response and it might be an unavoidable one, but here’s the thing: Teeth isn’t really a satire. Before its more nightmarish devices emerge, it is, terrifyingly, realism with banging songs.
While Dawn and the PKGs launched into “Precious Gift,†a rapturous anthem about the all-important task of preserving virginity, I found myself remembering another show on this very same stage at Playwrights Horizons. Will Arbery’s shadowy and superb Heroes of the Fourth Turning might not at first glance seem to share much with a bloody, bawdy musical, but Teeth is its spiritual sibling. Both plays are voyages into a particularly American darkness, and they come from places of painful personal knowing. Jackson — whose Pulitzer-winning A Strange Loop also digs deep into shame — writes about his own Baptist upbringing in the show’s program and has spoken about understanding “what it’s like to be afraid of your own body and to feel like … you’re going to hell.†The real pulse and power of Teeth is that, even as its blushing bloom ripens into a monstrous fruit, it keeps hold of its driving supertask. It’s really a show not about vagina dentata but about the cancerous cycles of self-loathing, misogyny, and violence that fester at the heart of purity culture.
Well, it’s also about vagina dentata. Dawn is headed for a traumatic discovery of what lurks in her lady parts. Despite their holiest efforts, she and Tobey — and, really, all the kids in Pastor’s thrall — are horny as hell. Dawn’s desire frightens and disgusts her (you don’t have to have been raised Evangelical to suffer along during her wrenching song of self-castigation, “The Shame in My Bodyâ€), while, for her step-brother, Brad (Will Connolly, wonderful at being awful), desire and shame have long since putrefied into hatred. Brad is Pastor’s son, Dawn his stepdaughter, and both moms are out of the picture — Brad’s fled, Dawn’s died. “He’s jealous,†Pastor tells Dawn, “’Cause even though you’re not my biological child and he is, the two of us could not be more bonded by the blood of the lamb.†While Dawn and Tobey struggle against their raging hormones, Brad descends into the dark web. Behind a VR mask, he finds his own spiritual leader, a men’s life coach called Godfather (voiced by Pasquale) who blames “male pain†on “the feminocracy†and dubs his premium subscribers “Truthseekers.†Again, is it satire if, with a few clicks, it can all be proved nauseatingly true-to-life?
Brad’s male pain is specific, and specifically linked to Dawn: He’s missing the first joint of a finger because, when they were children — he sings, face white, eyes blazing — “She bit me / It bit me.†Only Brad suspects what Dawn will soon learn, when she and Tobey finally succumb to their longing for each other one night in a lake. Crucially, Tobey has proposed, and Dawn loves him. She feels safe until he stops listening to her, until he’s hurting her, and something inside her bites back. Now the props designer, Matt Carlin, really gets to start having fun. From here on out, if you don’t want to see a bunch of bloody severed phalli, close your eyes. Because once Dawn’s second set of teeth have taken their first chomp, the show named for them jumps into allegorical revenge mode.
At first, it’s a gory blast: Real flames burst from Adam Rigg’s seemingly simple set, which turns out to contain a whole basket of Easter eggs; Pasquale gets to do yet another wild turn as an oleaginous gynecologist whose smarmy showstopper (“Girls Like Youâ€) feels like a hat-tip to Little Shop’s dastardly dentist while also reaching its own magnificent levels of cringe; the congregation’s closeted gay boy, Dawn’s friend Ryan (I saw Sean Doherty stepping in for Jared Loftin and knocking it out of the park), gets a deliciously nasty betrayal arc; and the PKGs — every one of them a powerhouse — step majestically into their ever-expanding role as Greek chorus, shape-shifting from leather-clad devils to mourning widows to ravening Bacchae.
There is, however, a but coming. The grander Teeth’s Guignol gets, the more diffuse it feels. Escalation is a tricky business — it’s why SNL sketches are rarely entirely successful; the writers know how to build but not how to finish. Teeth — which is so good in so many ways — currently suffers from the same problem. As Dawn goes from terrified of her own body to righteous wielder of its vulvic weaponry, the story of a real young woman’s empowerment, and her deep suffering, is obscured underneath a splatter of apocalyptica. Separately burrowing into dark Wikipedia, both Ryan and Brad come across an entry on an ancient goddess called Dentata. “She’s at the heart of men’s emasculation fears,†sings Ryan, to which Brad adds, whipping his online Truthseeker buddies into a frenzy, “Soon she’ll build herself an army and one by one / They’ll kill.†I don’t want to spoil the details of Teeth’s finale, but you can probably guess that it’s a Book of Revelations–style affair, ballooning into grisliness and mass destruction like Tetsuo at the end of Akira. Ultimately, in a gesture that feels a little too tired to be worthy of the greater part of Jacobs and Jackson’s writing, the goddess turns her voracious, merciless gaze out upon the audience. We are — oh, word that’s never quite as effective as we want it to be — implicated.
It’s too bad, because we’re also, in the show’s final moments, more distanced from the true anguish at its heart than we’ve been all along. What about Dawn? What happens to girls who are raised to loathe themselves, who blame themselves for the fall of man, who blame themselves when they’re raped? What happens — not just in the heightened horror-scape but in the world we’ve all got to live in every day — when so much internalized violence gushes out? “The moon turns red and the lines all blur,†sings Dawn, “and inside my head I’m reborn as her.†That inside my head is crucial, but it’s not how Jacobs, Jackson, and Benson play it. By blowing the top off of Teeth — by driving as hard as they do into literal Armageddon — the show’s creators get to wreak some fun theatrical havoc, but they also wind up sacrificing a good portion of their story’s humanity. And there’s an additional feeling of troubling fuzziness in the bloody rout: Masculine and feminine violence aren’t exactly being equated, but they’re no longer being as precisely distinguished in form and cause. While it’s tempting to go big and brazen, Teeth loses something as it bursts its seams. But what it’s got is still, in so many moments, lava-hot and canines-sharp. Underneath the fire and blood, the mythical battles and severed dicks — inside the promise ring and the cheap paneled walls of the church rec room — is the real horror show.
Teeth is at Playwrights Horizons through April 28.