Contains Adult Themes

Kristin Larsen, the creator of Contains Adult Themes, is to be commended for the riskiness of its subject matter and the originality of its conception. On the other hand, the play loses points for the somewhat sloppy execution of its ideas, in terms of both script and acting. Larsen, truly a fireball of young talent, needs to discipline both script and performance to consistently grab an audience.

The first of two short plays is "The Rest Is Up to You," concerning a young teenager who acquires a ventriloquist’s monkey named Maroon. Maroon keeps suggesting things to the girl, Inne, and she seems to take everything he says at face value. Most of what Maroon says seems calculated to take Inne’s innocence away, but the identity of this trickster is never actually revealed.

Since Inne does the talking for Maroon, its possible that this character is actually her own inner voice. Or it could be the voice of peers, urging her to face up to facts. When Inne goes to her first dance, her date, Tony, moves her around like a marionette. Perhaps Inne has reached a stage in her life when the domination of her inner voice (Maroon) is replaced by male domination (Tony). I was never quite sure.

The longer of the two plays is "In My Dresser Drawer." The drawer contains knives, scissors and other cherished cutting instruments. In this piece Larsen plays an older teenager, seeming more like a punk than a young innocent. Her character, Cid, is constantly arguing about chewing gum (a euphemism for self-mutilation) with someone called Verbal Communication, which might have been a dream figure or possibly part of her inner self, perhaps her superego.

Larsen gives Verbal an extremely high-pitched and grating voice, so strained that it’s difficult for her to express anything with a semblance of a nuanced speech. When Verbal gets around to shadow-dancing behind a screen, the effect was initially exciting: Larsen affixes to her fingers knives that look for all the world like Edward Scissorhands. But the shadow play goes on forever, accompanied by intoned, indecipherable poetry making it quite unpalatable.

"The Airport Pieces" is an overlong, dull, discursive and an unnecessary interruption to "In My Dresser Drawer," material supposedly written by Cid as a creative outlet for her frustrated energies. The script is not as funny as it needs to be, and in general Larsen needs to take more time, elongating and filling out the moments, making every moment count.

The most powerful scene occurred at the play’s end, when Cid opens her top dresser drawer and lovingly lays her favorite cutting instruments on the floor. Larsen pulls down much softer and slower here, explaining to the audience in a measured, matter-of-fact tone just why this young woman feels compelled to cut herself. Cid is not suicidal: “The knives absorb the hurt that seems to be happening all the time.”

The problem with the two pieces is not that they are experimental, not that they play around with space and time and not that they're sometimes inexplicable. Creativity certainly abounds with elements such as the ventriloquist’s dummy, the shadow-dancing, and even the studied display of cutting implements and their use.

The problem resides in the fact that there are too many arid stretches that do not hold the attention of the audience. It’s possible to manipulate audience attention and response quite a lot these days, but a performer must be in precise control of how she’s doing it. Grade: C+

— Mark Sterner