Can You Forgive Her?

Play (2016)
by Gina Gionfriddo

With Chris Henry Coffey (Graham), Tanya Fischer (Tanya), Meredith Forlenza (Miranda), Allyn Burrows (David), Theo Iyer (Sateesh)

How Gina Gionfriddo weaves the web of cruel intrigue that makes this psychological comedy so fascinating and rippingly entertaining, is a wonder. It seems fabricated out of almost nothing – a chance encounter in a bar – and yet it manages its colorful and distinct cast of personalities with an unrelenting and merciless magnifying glass that shows all the imperfections with vibrant and sadistic glee. It’s hilarious.

Gionfriddo, who authored the equally hysterical Becky Shaw (2008) and Rapture, Blister, Burn (2012), has an amazing capacity to construct engaging enough plots that support the intensely pointed interchanges that spice them. There is also enough poignancy and emotional depth along the way to create a persuasive texture to hold the repartee convincingly.

In Can You Forgive Her? the scene is equally populated by a kind of philosophical divide – between what is identified as the existential blackness of a self cruising on the edge of despair, and the adaptability of an organism to adjust to the scheme of life and engage its projects with durability and self-possession.

At the core of this monster-fest is Miranda (Meredith Forlenza), a financially indebted former student of literature who finds that to make ends meet she must engage life on a less elevated plane.

Forlenza gives a real tour de force performance here, outlandishly entertaining in every way. She manages to grab Gionfriddo’s already funny lines and amp them up so that they come off without any restraint, searing and unbridled. She is at once seductive, vulnerable and replete with sang froid, a cross between Cruella and Belle, relentlessly unsettling, caustically funny, and still oddly charming.

Filling out the corral of mutual misfits is Graham, the son of the recently deceased woman in whose house this chaos is unfolding, portrayed with subtlety and quiet conviction by Chris Henry Coffey,

Tanya Fischer plays his girlfriend, Tanya, with an adorable naivete that frames and contrasts Forlenza’s absorbingly revealing seductress.

Allyn Burrows (David) – in another corner of his career he is the artistic director of Actors’ Shakespeare Project – provides an appropriately stiff and stolid consort to Miranda’s utter slinkiness, very funny at moments in his bizarrely inadequate attempts to offer comforting and consoling gestures to others.

Theo Iyer (Sateesh), as Miranda’s feared Indian companion of the earlier evening, explodes on the scene at one point and delivers his brief but palpably wonderful responses with pungency and directness.

The brilliance of Gionfriddo’s writing is its capacity to deliver very funny lines effortlessly. Most of them, in this play, are handled exuberantly by Forlenza’s Miranda, but others get to join in the fun.

Other plot points provide wonderful ploys and dilemmas throughout. How Miranda finances her college debt, how Tanya finds method in a particular self-help tract, how Graham deals (or does not) with his deceased mother’s detritus, and how David searches for sexual and amicable companionship, not specifically in the same locations.

The set by Lauren Helpern is vivid and endearingly complex, recreating an old woman’s home with convincing variation.

– BADMan