Peformance Review: The Gene Pool

Figure 1.

Claire (Kimberley Schraf, above) and Mira (Jennifer Mendenhall) in Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company of Washington, D.C.’s production of Christi Stewart-Brown’s The Gene Pool, directed by Lee Mikeska Gardner. Photo: Stan Barouh.

Woolly Mammoth’s premiere production of Christie Stewart-Brown’s The Gene Pool portrays a stereotypical family, the Grays, who behave just like any other white, middle-class, nuclear family. Mira cooks, cleans, wears dresses, and is sexually frustrated. Her spouse is a workaholic veterinarian, has had an affair, and identifies with their son. The son, approaching his eighteenth birthday, has a new girlfriend with whom he wants to lose his virginity, is always hungry and munching on chips, and fidgets and pulls on his penis constantly. The only way in which the Gray family is not typical is that the parents are lesbians. Stewart-Brown’s comedy of manners for the 1990s suggests that lesbians already occupy the position of the stereotypical “family.” The play then uses that apparent normalcy to question the practices of the bourgeois nuclear family.

The opening and defining scene of the play quotes early television sitcoms. The lights come up on a contemporary living room set; the choreographed scene is underscored by 1950s television music, and Mira (Jennifer Mendenhall) performs a dance of domestic bliss: sweeping, dusting, and setting out a glass of wine and a rose for her mate returning from work. From the start, the juxtaposition of contemporary setting and costume and 1950s wifely behavior is humorously anachronistic. When Claire (Kimberly Schraf), dressed in a pantsuit and carrying a briefcase, enters, slams the door, picks up the mail, and calls, “Honey, I’m home,” the audience laughs. The laughter signifies both the recognition of this moment as epitomizing bourgeois domesticity and the denaturalization of that image when it is inhabited by two women’s bodies. The Gene Pool, then, at once reinforces habits of the nuclear family and offers a critique of assumptive heterosexuality.

Structurally, The Gene Pool is standard sitcom realism, its plot that of a tightly woven well-made play. It begins just before Peter’s birthday. In addition to losing his virginity, Peter (Jeff Lofton) wants to find out the identity of his birth father (whom his mothers call only the “sperm donor”). Peter’s pseudo-punk girlfriend Paige (Tina Frantz) is the outsider who propels the plot. She functions as the force who asks which is Peter’s “real” mother and encourages Peter to find his “father.” Before Paige’s arrival, Peter is delightfully oblivious to most everything except food and his penis.

Much of the play’s humor relies on the women’s complementary gender roles, which are unpredictable because they are the same sex. Peter’s pair of mothers have opposite reactions to his desires—one thinks he should know his sperm donor, the other doesn’t; one thinks he should not be having sex, the other buys him a huge box of condoms and demonstrates on a zucchini how to use them; one likes his girlfriend, the other doesn’t. What the women have in common, however, and what defines the politics of the play, is the commitment to a long-term monogamous relationship and the structure of a nuclear family. The women insist that they are both Peter’s mothers and justify their joint name thus: one’s name had been Black and the other’s White, so they got together and became Gray.

The actors’ movements are crisply choreographed by director Lee Mikeska Gardner on a revolving set that shows the living room on one side and the front door to the suburban home on the other. The production’s physical humor includes a scene in which Mira wraps herself in Saran Wrap according to instructions in The Sensuous Woman. In different, successive scenes, both Peter, who “read the book for my Women’s Studies class,” and Claire tell Mira, in exactly the same intonation, that “You’re not supposed to wear underwear...