Getting divorced is like falling in love in reverse, posits playwright Jami Brandli in her new play, O: A Rhapsody In Divorce. It’s a great turn of phrase and an interesting notion, but like so many of the show’s assertions that are dropped like feathers left to float around on stage without real examination, it ends up being an idea without any real heft.
Perhaps this is why Brandli anchored her modern story of a 40-year-old woman reeling from an unwanted divorce to Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. To make it a modern feminist retelling of sorts that would hopefully metaphor its way into meaning.
It’s not hard to see how some parts fit. Divorce after all is like fighting a war and then facing all sorts of demons as you try to find your way back home. Or more accurately you try to find your way to a new home with a new you and a new direction. But let’s not quibble about that. The metaphor works more or less and there are enough subtle nods to the epic tale in the play to support the idea.
O (Sammi Sicinski) is a 40-year-old successful neurobiologist workaholic who studies what happens to our brains when we’re in love. Tired of her absence in the marriage and no longer happy in the relationship, her husband (Rhett Martinez) asks for a divorce. His refusal to leave their home means that O goes on an “odyssey” of sleeping on various friend’s couches while trying to figure out what the future holds.
What ensues is a series of skit-like short scenes that place O in all the dramedy scenarios you’d expect.
There’s the married wine-drinking friend who wants to live vicariously through O’s potential new sexual encounters. A scene that would have been overly familiar had it not been for a terrific performance by Arianna Bermudez as the boozy lustful buddy.
A night out at a lesbian dance party that feels awfully reductive. Drinking too much at a bar and nearly falling prey to a date-rapey guy. Calling up the nice guy ex, only to realize that while the sex is good, he still isn’t the guy for you.
It would all feel like a decades-old PG-rated mainstream movie if not for the injection of that old Greek play device – the chorus – to act as narrator, taunter and feeling exposer for O.
The most successful use of the trio (Pamela Garcia Langton, Arianna Bermudez and Mayra Monsavais) are their announcements of a “shame storm” coming in whenever O starts to conjure feelings of low self-worth. Cleverly they buzz around her spitting out O’s dark feelings in a very nicely staged example of just how searing our feelings of disgrace can be.
It’s too bad then that the rest of their dialogue sounds mostly like it’s been pulled from divorce pop psychology self-help books. You must kill your past self before you can reveal your future self. Self-love is the only love that will move you forward and make you whole. It goes on and on.
This is not to say there isn’t value in all these notions. Hell, Oprah made millions and helped millions espousing these same ideas. It’s just that we’ve heard them already. Nothing about the advice feels fresh or eye-opening in this story. We know the steps O must take and where it’s going to take her.
What is exciting, if underbaked, in the show is O’s neurobiology assessment of the situation. Using her science brain, O tries to define how she’s feeling and what re-wiring her brain must undergo to get out of the pain she’s in. We’ve studied the brains of the heartbroken, she laments. What about the ones that break the hearts? What do we know about their brains?
This is the interesting stuff. And it’s where Sicinski gets to shine out from under all the stereotypical divorce narrative. We could have been less bothered by the therapy-speak sloganeering had this intellectual side been given more examination and time on stage.
Instead – as O makes her eventual “journey” home – a tie into past family dynamics that feels distracting, all we are left with is a feeling that O’s odyssey was fueled by motivational quotes with a tiny bit of Homer on the side.
O: A Rhapsody In Divorce runs through February 3 at Studio 101, 1824 Spring Street. Tickets are pay what you can. mildredsumbrella.com
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
