Review: Body Language: A Radical Truth

Critic’s Pick

This production turns out to be an ambitious venture, part sociological tract — not to worry: if the material is heavy, the treatment is light — and part surprising theatrical experience in a space that has its own sense of theater. On opening night there were still a few loose ends, but they should be knitted up as the work continues.

The sizeable audience was divided into three groups and marshaled through various hallway and classroom encounters in the original Woodward High School (aka the current School for the Creative and Performing Arts), where turn-of-the-last-century architecture remains dignified and classical whatever occupies its space.

This work stems from interviews by the nonprofit True Body Project with Cincinnati-area women and teen-age girls, concerning their feelings about their bodies and how those feelings affect their engagement with the world. Badly, it seems, in many cases. But all is not down the drain.

Acceptance of self by the individual and the world, we learn in an odd epilogue involving a young girl, her mother and two garbage cans — separately but temporarily inhabited by the two of them — makes for a rewarding life.

These are hardly new ideas, but the sneaky prevalence of self-disdain, exposed through the True Body Project interviews, suggests they must be continually re-thought. Body Language does so by way of a slightly goofy faux scientist, a grim school teacher who doesn’t want to be in her classroom any more than you want to be there, a stay in detention that's just as bad as you remember it and a trip through Old Woodward High School, a treat in itself.

Project Director Stacey Sims says that learning to live with your own body isn’t just women’s work, that men can benefit from similar self-examination. All I can report is that most men at the performance I attended stayed through to the end.

— Jane Durrell