A group of Promise Keeper Girls vow to remain chaste until marriage in uproarious Teeth (photo by Chelcie Parry)
TEETH
Playwrights Horizons, Mainstage Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 28, $125-$145
www.playwrightshorizons.org
As if the world isn’t screwed up enough, now we have to be on the lookout for toothy genitalia.
In the 2013 book The Moral Panics of Sexuality, Michelle Ashley Gohr, in the chapter “Do I Have Something in My Teeth? Vagina Dentata and Its Manifestations within Popular Culture,” writes, “Although it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the seemingly endless tirade of moral and political outrage, corporate greed, sex scandals, gun violence, and more, these societal crises have not simply spontaneously arisen in response to a mere few contemporary problems. Rather, today’s moral panics represent an aggregate of borrowed histories layered on for centuries upon centuries. . . . One well known anxiety, the fear of female sexuality, signifies one such displaced anxiety that has taken a displaced form through the little known yet subtly prevalent myth of vagina dentata. While this myth or its basic retellings may not have an obvious place in everyday language or discourse (and few are aware of the myth’s manifestations in current U.S. culture), it nevertheless functions as a powerful force in contemporary conversations about women’s sexuality and the villainization of female desire.”
Gohr, an Arizona State University librarian and faculty associate, then goes on to discuss Michael Lichtenstein’s 2007 award-winning horror comedy Teeth, in which a teenage virgin finds out the hard way that she has teeth in her vagina.
Pulitzer Prize winner Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs have now adapted the film into the ravenously funny and bloody musical Teeth, continuing at Playwrights Horizons through April 28.
The story takes place in the present day in New Testament Village, where Pastor Bill O’Keefe (Steven Pasquale) runs a congregation of high school students called Promise Keeper Girls, who have vowed to remain chaste until marriage, along with several celibate boys. In his opening livestreamed homily about Adam and Eve and the serpent and the apple, he declares, “Woman? Where is your fig leaf? Woman? Where is your shame? I’m gonna ask that again! WOMAN? WHERE IS YOUR FIG LEAF? WOMAN? WHERE IS YOUR SHAME?!?”
He is decrying Amy Sue Pearson, a pregnant teenager he says “let the Enemy corrupt her mind!” He has charged his cultlike team of followers with the responsibility of “carrying the banner for an especially awesome message of female empowerment through sexual purity!,” but he feels they have failed their mission by not protecting Amy Sue. He rails against the boys and the girls, warning them that the same thing better not happen to them. Promise Keeper Girls leader Dawn, the pastor’s stepdaughter, falls right in line, declaring, “I say Promise Keeper Girls can’t be about feeling good! I say Promise Keeper Girls have to be about being good!!!”
A trio of Truthseekers vow to fight for masculinity in horror comedy musical at Playwrights Horizons (photo by Chelcie Parry)
Dawn and the other PKGs, Becky (Courtney Bassett), Fiona (Phoenix Best), Trisha (Jenna Rose Husli), Rachael (Lexi Rhoades), Stephanie (Wren Rivera), and Keke (Helen J Shen) assure Pastor Bill that they will not allow any boy to pound their precious gift, and Tobey (Jason Gotay) and Ryan (Jared Loftin) swear they will do no pounding. But Brad (Will Connolly), the pastor’s son, is having none of it. A shy, withdrawn gamer, Brad thinks the church is a sham. He turns instead to a secret group known as the Truthseekers, led by a mysterious disembodied voice called Godfather, as if the exact opposite of the pastor.
“There’s a pain all men carry, Truthseekers,” Godfather says to Brad and a pair of fellow Truthseekers (Gotay and Loftin) wearing black VR headsets. “Some of us carry it in our shoulders. Some in our stomachs. Some of us even carry it in our balls — in our nutsacks. It’s a pain we’ve become numb to in this era of ‘dismantling the patriarchy.’ An era where our every word is ‘mansplaining.’ An era where any male who expresses sexual desire gets labeled a predator or an ‘incel.’ We can’t even sit on a bloody train without being ‘manspreaders’ for Christ’s sakes! Because we take up too much space!” Godfather proclaims that their enemy is the feminocracy — but to learn how to fight back, the trio must access Truthseeker Premium.
As Brad delves further into the Truthseekers and Dawn and Tobey consider going all the way, the battle lines are drawn and blood is spilled from the hungry choppers that inhabit Dawn’s yearning vulva.
Pastor Bill O’Keefe (Steven Pasquale) has his hands full as he tries to save teenage girls from being pounded between their thighs (photo by Chelcie Parry)
Jacobs (POP!, Harmony, Kansas) and Jackson (A Strange Loop, White Girl in Danger) collaborated on the terrific book, which pays homage to Little Shop of Horrors — one scene involving a gynecologist (Pasquale) harkens back to Little Shop’s dentist dilemma — while tackling religious obsession, female empowerment, and sexual desire. Jacobs composed the rousing score, which crosses genres, while Jackson wrote the lyrics to such hilarious songs as “Precious Gift,” “Between Her Thighs,” “Modest Is Hottest,” “According to the Wiki,” and “Take Me Down.” Kris Kukul’s expert orchestrations are horror-movie worthy, performed by music director and conductor Patrick Sulken and Randy Cohen on keyboards, John Putnam and Liz Faure on guitar, Steve Count on bass, Melissa Tong on violin, and Marques Walles on drums and percussion.
It’s hard to beat such quatrains as “Press our flesh together / Bless me as her groom / Watch me be reborn as I / Fertilize her womb” and “As promise keeper girls, we’re soldiers in battle / With this ring we sally forth to win the war / His word is very clear, he gave us two choices / Take your pick — are you a virgin or a whore?”
Obie-winning director Sarah Benson (Fairview, In the Blood, Samara) fills nearly every moment with wild and woolly fun, culminating in an orgiastic finale that reverberates throughout the theater. Raja Feather Kelly’s choreography rocks out to Jacobs’s music on Adam Rigg’s two-level set, which always has a cross hanging in the back, often set aglow as if delivering messages from above (and below). Enver Chakartash’s costumes range from hoodies and high school jackets to leather and lace, with prominent heavenly whites and demonic reds. Jane Cox and Stacey Derosier’s lighting and Palmer Hefferan’s sound envelop the audience, while Jeremy Chernick’s tongue-in-cheek special effects up the ante.
The ensemble cast has a field day incorporating tropes from horror films and coming-of-age dramas. The set can barely contain Pasquale (The Light in the Piazza, American Son), who infuses the pastor with otherworldly aspirations. Louis (White Girl in Danger, Soft Power) beautifully plays Dawn, who undergoes quite a metamorphosis, while Connolly (Once, Clueless: The Musical) is wonderfully mopey as the disgruntled Brad.
Jackson, who won the Pulitzer and two Tonys for his first show, the semiautobiographical A Strange Loop, might have slipped a bit with his follow-up, the disjointed and overwrought White Girl in Danger, but he gets right back on track with Teeth, a precious gift with plenty of bite.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]