No

by AJ Sage

Review by Paul Hansom

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No. Written and Directed by A.J.Sage. Assistant directed and produced by Katie Wallace. With Ali Diemecke and Nate Murphy

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No concerns a young couple: a pregnant Frankie and her beau, Steven, on an apparently innocuous afternoon together. In fact, it begins with the possibility of joy between them, as Steven asks Frankie to marry him. At this moment of potential happiness there appears to be some tension, a sticking point. While Frankie wants to get married, she seems unsure, hesitant, and it’s this mysterious hesitation which gives her character a powerful undertow that develops over the course of the play. Their potential joy is clearly tempered less by youthful romance than by real-world contingencies, and these splits become more pronounced as the drama unfolds.

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From the get-go we also find out that Frankie has a bit of a temper, that she has a tendency to lash out. She’s got herself into trouble at the restaurant she manages by slapping a customer, and she’s on tenterhooks, waiting for a dreaded phone call that might be a reprimand, or a firing. Either way, their futures may be changing. As their day progresses, this troubled couple poke into their incongruous lives, Frankie having a go at Steven for his lack of gumption, his disregard of money, and his over-concern for the novel he is apparently working on.

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While Steven seems innocuous enough, he has a pronounced hunger for sex, and we see that his horniness is difficult to handle for Frankie. In fact, sex seems to be the basis of the play’s title. We also discover that Steven has spent a lot of money on the engagement ring and a manual typewriter he believes will improve his writing. And instead of going for a job interview that will most certainly help the family out, Steven committed himself to a daydream. This clash between Frankie’s real-world vision and Steven’s idealism is clear, and is the dramatic rift between them.

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Of course the baby becomes the central problem between them, since we find out that she is pregnant not out of a mutual agreement, but out of force, an attempted rape on Steven’s part. This revelation finally pushes Frankie to attack Steven for his inability to hear her side of things.

As Frankie, Ali Diemecke captures the dynamic tension of an emotionally distraught woman. She’s clearly concerned by her own eruptions, her own acts of random violence, but she recognizes how her intimate life is also made up of similar violent transgressions. Diemecke is both nuanced and forceful, and runs the full range of outrage and tenderness to produce a powerful performance.

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Nathan Murphy’s Steven is similarly delicately sketched, and we sense his growing entrapment as he also struggles to balance his artistic needs and desires against Frankie’s growing anger and distress. Between their two struggles, Murphy and Diemecke deliver an on-target portrait of a relationship at a crossroads.