By Stuart Miller . . .
Amie Enriquez’s one-woman show, Lightweight, is difficult to review. In part because it feels cruel to criticize someone who bares their deepest trauma—in her case, anorexia, for which she spent a year in a rehab program—in front of an audience. And people relating either specifically to that trauma, or perhaps more generally to having spent time in long-term rehab, may find the show powerful or beneficial (like the woman sobbing outside the SoHo Playhouse afterward). Add in plenty of humor, some genuinely moving moments, along with some provocative and creative ideas and the result is a show I really wanted to like.
But I couldn’t.
It’s fair to complain that as a man who has never had any issues similar to this I may not be properly attuned to Amie’s issues or Enriquez’s comic sensibility, but the play’s flaws are often structural in a way that go beyond the particulars of the subject matter. (The show drew scattered laughs from a few audience members, though another disadvantage for Enriquez was that there were only twenty people in the crowd.)
The show opens with Enriquez adeptly portraying several women in a group therapy session, but when it’s Amie’s turn to speak she is loud and insufferable, an attention hog who devours all the oxygen in the room. That’s not a bad place to start. A disease like anorexia creates an obsessive personality—we see Amie downing laxatives and then forcing herself to run, despite the publicly humiliating results—and people can become exceedingly self-involved, focused only on themselves and their plight.
This is illuminated later in a scene in which Amie is counting out peanuts and calories while ignoring the news reports of first one, and then a second plane, crashing into the World Trade Center. As a native New Yorker, I personally found the recounting of that actual trauma distracting, but the bigger issue is that the scene, like so many in the show, just went on too long.
But art is not real life and asking an audience to spend an hour-and-a-quarter with a self-centered, grating person is asking too much. There’s no real character arc, and without an evolution we just grow exhausted by Amie. Enriquez leavens this with humor, but much of it fell flat, in part because her delivery was so frantic so much of the time. But even when she’s playing her other characters, like father, who is full of bluster and hits on the therapist, she wallows in cliché.
Thirty minutes in, Amie calms down and, in one of the few actual scenes of therapy, talks about the origins of her anorexia, about her body developing early in a way that prompted her mother to push her into modeling and how that drew unwanted attention and touching from grown men. The information isn’t surprising (the circumstances are, unfortunately, all too common), but her matter-of-fact explanation of why she wanted to whittle her body down toward invisibility is moving.
The scene makes you wonder if this would have worked better as a monologue, allowing Enriquez to share detailed stories and mix in the introspection and insights the play is lacking. Instead, she quickly ramps the volume back up. A scene with the ghost of Karen Carpenter brings to mind A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life, but it keeps going long after the energy has been drained away. The show ends with Amie talking to a cupcake. Again, plenty of potential and Enriquez is adept at performing with the large hand-held puppet, but director Lauren Weedman indulges Enriquez and lets the scene play too long without really taking Amie anywhere new.
The ending feels pat, as if Amie got better simply because the show was reaching its end. There’s not enough deep reflection or development of her relationship with her parents; and there is not a genuine sense of the therapy process and how it may have failed her initially—or, how she finally healed.
At the end, we see a montage of photos of Enriquez and journal entries, many of which mention God. But, she did not discuss her faith during the show and it’s not clear if this is a deeply felt lifetime thing or a surrendering to a higher power in a twelve-step process. Either way, it should have been part of the discussion of her journey.
The pictures themselves are touching and as a person, I’m glad Enriquez is in a good place in terms of her physical and emotional health, but as a critic, the ending did not feel earned.
Lightweight. Through August 26 at SoHo Playhouse (15 Van Dam Street, Between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street). 77 minutes, no intermission. www.sohoplayhouse.com
Photos: Mandee Johnson
