"Chances are that you have had a friend who fell in love with someone you felt was, to put it kindly, unsuitable. Yet the more you listened to your friend talk, the more you saw this object of adoration through her eyes. And maybe you came not only to understand the attraction but even almost to share it.
Such is the experience of listening to Erica, the enraptured heroine of Nick Robideau's INANIMATE, the sly and very likable comedy...the 30-year-old Erica has for the first time found true romance, and-yes, yes, oh yes-she never knew it could be like this.
She'd shout it from the rooftops if she could. But she fears society is not ready to accept this relationship. Erica, you see, is in love with a wonderful-wait for it-fast-food restaurant sign.
A Dairy Queen sign, to be specific. Erica fondly calls it Dee, after the first letter of its illuminated name. Or rather, his name. Erica knows that 'his energy is male'.
The category of loves that dare not speak their names, at least from American theater stages, keeps shrinking. In 2002, Edward Albee's THE GOAT, OR WHO IS SYLVIA? presented a married architect's affair with a barnyard animal as a means of exploring the limits of erotic tolerance. INANIMATE takes this investigation a step further, with a fractured lyricism all its own.
The brave new world-or perhaps not so new, just previously unmentionable-that Mr Robideau has ventured into is clinically known as 'objectum sexuality', or objectophilia. As Erica eventually discovers, it is a condition that now has its own websites, online forums and support groups; it has even been the subject of documentaries, such as Strange Love: Married to the Eiffel Tower.
Clinical, though, is definitely not the word for INANIMATE...this play unfolds as a sort of normcore comic variation on ROMEO AND JULIET, which insists we regard its central relationship as worthy of high flights of poetic fancy.
Such a perspective could so easily lean toward smirky voyeurism or cloying cuteness. And in the opening scenes, I worried that a perverse preciousness might dominate.
But INANIMATE wins us over by contextualizing its exotic subject in the bedrock of the familiar. Subjectively, most of us went through what Erica is experiencing when we were teenagers, terrified by the insistent promptings of our libidos. And as the play progresses, and Erica confesses her once secret
love, Mr Robideau drolly insinuates that all tales of coming to terms with sexuality are 'coming out' stories.
The provincial New England that Erica inhabits is not unlike the dead-end environs of an Annie Baker play. As in Ms Baker's THE ALIENS and THE FLICK, the outsider characters of INANIMATE are trapped in a state of protracted adolescence, equally terrified of being stuck in or ever leaving their insular Massachusetts hometown."
Ben Brantley, The New York Times
