Stale Laundry – An Irked Youth’s Thoughts on Boomer Love
WARNING: This review contains spoilers.
At the end of the day, I get it. Times have been tough, and when the going gets tough and revenue must be guaranteed, safe choices need to be made.
Thousand Islands Playhouse marks its return with award-winning Vancouver playwright Michele Riml’s Sexy Laundry. The play follows the tale of a tepid night shared by a middle-aged couple that aim to fuck themselves out of the consistent dissatisfaction brought forth by their old-school marriage.
I knew from the get-go that I was going to be out of my element as an audience member, but what didn’t click until the show began was truly how far I was from the target demographic, a lesson that only became more apparent as time passed.
These days, I only encounter network television when I’m in a hotel. After searching for a remote (usually extremely durable yet hardly functioning), I’ll flop onto crisp white hotel bedding and turn on some mindless program that’ll ease the passing of time between events — that’s what Sexy Laundry was.
Stuck in a hotel room themselves, Sexy Laundry explores how married couple Alice (Sarah Dodd) and Henry (Shawn Wright) grapple with the root of their monogamous misery—each other. With performances straight out of your favourite family sitcom, their all-too-common frustrations are brought about by poor communication and a disturbing lack of emotional maturity. The driving force behind the events of the lukewarm night is Alice’s desire to spice up the couple’s sex life, awkwardly manifested as the textbook-like ‘Sex for Dummies’ manual.
In my mind, this comedy really pokes at the sentiment that the Americas were indeed invaded and repopulated by Settlers saturated in a Puritan ethos. The show’s success points to the reality that generational trauma persists as sexual repression for enough White folks that the complete lack of sexual chemistry between Alice and Henry (despite having procreated) is entirely relatable.
Yes, my extremely radical take here is that North Americans are prudes because of their cultural history (scandalous!). This isn’t a new take because the play doesn’t really explore anything new, just what’s relatable. And it’s tough to garner novel realizations from such explored material.
Alice and Henry felt like stock human beings, and I think that’s what they were designed to be, massively marketable and universally relatable figures. Although Dodd and Wright shove as much energy as possible into their characters, their performances weren’t enough to render their characters likeable or interesting given their lowest-common-denominator personalities. They pulled a couple of dry chuckles out of me every once in a while but in their attempts to convey their deepest sexual fantasies to each other, no one in this 25-year marriage could muster more of the other’s imagination than an Old Spice commercial might. Alice’s sexual fantasies are presented like a 12-year-old’s Wattpad short story, featuring two Italian barista’s that happen to have some slight homosexual flair, and the deepest insight we get into Henry’s desires, presented as a never-expressed inner monologue, came across as a church-sponsored Facebook post that aggressively romanticizes domesticity.
What they really nailed was just how frustrating an uncommunicative and grumpy White man can be. At Henry’s most emotional, he admits he didn’t get the promotion he wanted, as though his perceived lessening of the value of his work justifies his intolerable angst. His problems aren’t explored as wider criticisms of Western labour culture or anything of the sort, he’s simply a grumpy company man. Similarly, Alice’s struggles with self-esteem as an aging woman could be cathartic, but are never taken seriously enough to offer a critical perspective on the conflation of self-worth and self-perception relative to beauty standards.
It was as if they lived in and were reacting to a world as devoid of contemporary context as their inky dark surroundings propounded, as if this comedy took place in an absurd pocket dimension where only the most surface level concerns were (hardly) considered. Their tribulations are explored as weakly as their sexual fantasies are.
Director Krista Jackson discusses how the pandemic has impacted and informed the Thousand Islands Playhouse and her own future in the podcast episode KRISTA JACKSON: Book Smart. This pause created by the pandemic has been described as a chance to reshuffle artistic priorities; to decentralize White theatre and focus on the narratives of those whose voices and stories are simply not being told. But as it turns out, my homework was for naught! Because the only new thing about Sexy Laundry was its implementation of emerging technologies.
The quick cuts and zooms of the camera imbued the show’s livestream at times with the essence of a television soap opera. The theatricality of the actors was heavily punctuated by camera angles, cutting from one view to another for seemingly no particular reason other than to keep me on my toes. The constant adjustment of how the action was framed could’ve been innovative, but truly just felt like raw television footage, and at times like a Saturday Night Live skit. It’s difficult to maintain human perspective in an online experience, but it was made all the more unattainable when the autonomy of viewership is disjointedly stripped from the audience.
The age of the internet and its democratization of art has resulted in the regular consumption of extremely tailored content which may render the flavourlessness of Alice and Henry borderline unbearable. But this production not only sold tickets, it sold out! Is TIP’s demographic looking to get lost in the shallow struggles of a marriage that isn’t theirs (for once)? Did Alice and Henry’s eventual lackluster resolution hint that people should just be content, and maintain their repressed ways for comfort? Or was it an attempt at a feel-good comedy, insofar as watching such a lame couple could make one feel more optimistic about the uniqueness and passion of their own personal relations?
For the audience’s sake, I hope it’s the latter. But even then, the fact of the matter is that the show begs the question of its own purpose and screams a lack of intriguing intent. Theatre doesn’t need a grander purpose than entertainment, but wouldn’t it be nice if it did have something interesting to say? The international hit Sexy Laundry succeeds in selling out once more, and theatre survives to make money another day.
Sexy Laundry runs from August 5th -September 4th, 2021 at the Thousand Islands Playhouse, and is available on demand through their box office. Click here for tickets and more information.