Giant Box of Porn

It’s fitting that there’s a joke about Tumblr early on in Field Trip Theatre’s production of Giant Box of Porn, because the feeling I had when I first read about the show’s conceit is the same I have when I stumble upon a new, brilliant Tumblr for the first time: thrilled by how genius it is, and jealous I didn’t think of it first.

Unfortunately, this unique conceit is somewhat squandered and forced to take a back seat to an otherwise typical story of young married life in DC.

So as not to bury the lede any further, let’s get right to that ingenious premise: Young, married DC couple Kate (Anna Jackson) and Ron (Grant Cloyd) return from a weekend at the Delaware shore to find someone has broken into their one-bedroom apartment while they were away and left the eponymous cardboard box of pornographic VHS tapes in their living room. Kate wants it gone immediately, but Ron pleads to her to let him get to the bottom of where it came from. She gives him one week to unlock the mystery before they leave for a trip to Aruba.

The undeniable center of the play is Jackson’s scene-stealing performance. She plays a very recognizably driven, goal-oriented, anal-retentive type of late-20-something woman living in the nation’s capital, and to her credit, she never lets her portrayal slip into something shrill.

I was left not knowing how playwright Patrick Flynn wanted the audience to feel about Kate; certainly the rest of the characters view her as uptight and high-strung, but I couldn’t help feeling for her. She spends most of the 90-minute show apologizing for one thing or another—she manages to be pegged at various times as too prudish and too slutty; too work-obsessed and too baby-crazy. Not only can Kate not “have it all,” she can’t even catch a break.

By contrast, Ron is an overgrown man-child who speaks of promotions and plans with the kind of contempt typically reserved for genocide and cancer. For most of the play it’s unclear why these two are even married, let alone in love. At one point Kate points out they complement each other because she’s serious and responsible and he’s fun and spontaneous—yet he spends much of the week whining about how he wasted his college years by not experimenting with drugs and casual sex.

Cloyd does a fantastic job of embodying this role, but again, I couldn’t quite figure out if we were supposed to sympathize with this put-upon, micromanaged husband, or be infuriated by his wet blanket-ness (I, obviously, gravitated toward the latter).

The remaining characters include Kate’s older sister, Vanessa (Morganne Davies), and Ron’s bachelor buddy, Sherlock (Will Hayes). Unfortunately, these characters never truly rise above the rank of caricature. Hayes plays Sherlock with great energy and enthusiasm, but the fact that his character embodies the worst of straight-guy stereotypes (he puts his fingers in his ears and shouts “la-la-la” when confronted with the idea that women poop and simply can’t handle the fact that someone who is a mom can also be into pornography) make it hard to view him as a real person.

Similarly, Vanessa is an enigma—eventually, it’s revealed through a line about organic Native American baby toys that she’s supposed to be a very new-age mom, but I was distracted up to this point wondering why someone who is roughly the same age as the rest of the cast has never heard of a meme or why she speaks like a vaguely British nanny who abhors contractions.

Still, Flynn’s script is packed with well-written one-liners and interesting ideas about sex and gender roles. Director Maureen Monterubio does a fantastic job keeping her cast’s energy up and maximizing the performance space, and the whole production is admirably polished and professional.

And yet, at the end of Giant Box of Porn, I found myself looking at the big box of smut and longing to know more about its origin story, and less about yet another pairing of an overbearing wife and her slacker husband.

Take me to the DCTS 2014 Capital Fringe Guide