Playwright Trista Baldwin, an ASU MFA Playwriting alum, has a distinctive way of looking at the world. Her plays are broad yet sharp, full of teeth that are ready to grin and quick to bite. Patty Red Pants, which has been seen in New York at the Fringe Festival, is a twist on the "Little Red Riding Hood" fairytale that outs the lurid sexual subtext of the piece and moves it to a modern world where every woman is a waiting, preprogrammed victim and every man is a predator with an appetite for virgins. In the hands of Stray Cat Theatre's Artistic Director Ron May, the piece is breathless sprint that is at turns funny and disturbing, an effective look at the traps of mid-teen adolescent girls growing up in a world that prizes their innocence while attempting to find every way to snatch it from them simultaneously.
The play is a flashback for Patty, a shattered mirror of memory that brings her back to a time eleven years prior when she and her best friend Becky Bloom navigated the wolf-filled woods of sexual awakening just after a young girl was killed in the forest behind their houses. It's obvious early on what has shattered her memory, but that doesn't stop the audience from watching with mounting fear as the younger innocent Patty and her more sexually knowledgeable, yet no less innocent friend race toward their horrific fates. My only quibbles with this impressive script are its length, as the final five minutes seem excessive, and the fact that there is not a single redeeming quality portrayed in men. By the end of the evening, the play made me feel like I should cut off my male member and shower in holy water for absolution.
The script calls for a lot of in-place running, and May has little balanced the frantic pace of this sprinting with quieter moments of reflection, which can make the audience feel worn out by the conclusion. Still, his physicalizations for the performers and the blocking are quite effective.
Kerry McCue's Patty is a dynamo, full of awakening passions and later realized regrets and demons. She is very successful whether she's playing the innocently desirous fifteen year-old and the distracted twenty-six year-old forced to recall the watershed time. Her awakening sexual desires and victimizing innocence are presented over-the-top, but that is exactly the level required by the script. Cynthia Allen is wonderful as the equally desperate Becky, capturing her rebellious spirit and need to have someone to depend on her. The relationship between these two seems quite real. Luke Krueger is just the right amount of presentational and foreboding in his dual roles as the imagined wolf on the prowl in the woods and the equally dangerous teenager Jeremy, who blunders through Patty and Becky's lives searching only for his own gratification.
The scenic element of the production is at just the right level to support the script. Ruth A. George's unit set features the trunk of a large tree center, and draping leaves around, while Randy Braunm's lighting captures all the moods and moments well. Kerry McCue's costumes are very good and even have a few moments of cleverness, and Benjamin Monrad's sound design is solid.
Patty Red Pants is filled with ominous premonitions and awkward repetitions, all of which make sense as it rushes to its forgone conclusion. A little judicious trimming of the final section and perhaps noticing one redeeming quality in men is all that is needed to make this a perfect cutting-edge script.