Grace Rockett, Anikka Hanson, Lizzie Song, Olivia Daniels, Riel Reddick-Stevens, Jenn Tan, Shannon Murtagh, Tkaia Green, Lara Hamburg, Miranda Wiseman, Heeyun Park, Astrid Atherly in “I Was Unbecoming Then”, Photo by Taylor Long
I Was Unbecoming Then opens with a crew member unrolling a large beige carpet. Along with some freestanding light panels, it is the only set element designer Echo Zhou 周芷會 provides to establish a high school music room from 2006. She knows it’s really just a prompt, an invitation, a platform for twelve girls that will take their place on it. It is they who truly define the space.
Amped up by hormones and communal energy, they negotiate their teenage angst as individuals and a group. Prepping for a big competition and scrambling for the attention of choir director Bruce, they confide, console, antagonize and reaffirm each other. They are conniving and boastful and insecure and playful and—fully real.
Taking cues from A Chorus Line, this musical has each of the girls stepping out from the group to tell us a little bit about themselves. It’s a stylized, very sturdy format. Lyndsey Bourne (book and lyrics) and Sam Kaseta (music) don’t give us traditional numbers. The musicality here is looser and more organic. The girls fall naturally into the harmonies they’ve rehearsed; this collaborative bond becomes the unifying aspect of their existence, allowing them to express and relate to the anxiety, lust and joys of growing up.
Looming large in their tense sphere is the eyebrow-raising, intimate relationship with male authority figures Bruce and Ted. This dubious dynamic leads to an emotionally charged event and strains the girls’ relationships. The momentum gets snagged on the darker edges of this section of the story and, strangely, lacks much of the urgency of the lighter, sillier moments. The image of the girls gathered around a Motorola Razr, though, as they try to connect to Bruce, whom they can see crying alone in his car, is eerie and raw.
There is a casual chic charm to costume designer Daniella McNeill’s outfits, giving us a vivid sense of who these girls imagine themselves to be—identity as an act of creative invention. This ensemble (Astrid Atherly, Olivia Daniels, Tkaia Green, Lara Hamburg, Anikka Hanson, Shannon Murtagh, Heeyun Park 박희윤, Riel Reddick-Stevens, Grace Rockett and Lizzie Song) is fully in tune with each other as they flesh out these dozen compelling portraits.
Offbeat anecdotes, quirky confessions and bizarre sexual fantasies grant us insights into these girls’ interior lives with intimate, resonant details. Ilana Khanin’s direction offers plenty of striking tableau, maintaining a palpable tension between our experience of them as individuals and as a complex unit. Shout out to music director Alexa Belgrave for some thrilling harmonic moments. At the performance I attended, a gentlemen in the audience couldn’t help but gasp “Nice!” after a particularly potent vocal incident. Especially astonishing is the poignancy of small, seemingly offhand gestures… like asking for a hair elastic.
