Ingram New Works: Next Stage
The Wonderful Bite of BloodSuckingLeech
Last year the Nashville Repertory Theatre presented a staged reading of BloodSuckingLeech as part of the Ingram New Works Project. This May BloodSuckingLeech was given a staged “enhanced production” as part of the project’s Next Stage program. This development of the work included having the playwright, Amy Tofte, attend rehearsals and make alterations to the script as she found necessary, even changing the ending two weeks before the performances. To my unsophisticated eye, the difference between this “enhanced” production and a regular play was difficult to distinguish; the script was memorized, they wore costumes and inhabited a furnished set, with professional lighting, sound, and so forth. I say this not as a criticism, but praise: this play doesn’t feel like a work in progress. It feels like a hit.
The play is about the responsible daughter Erica and her elderly but immature mother Martha. Martha has been lonely since the death of her husband, and there are two “leeches” that make use of her age and vulnerability to wheedle cash out of her, one in the person of Niko, who pretends to help around the house, and the other who is an online scammer.
BloodSuckingLeech is based on the playwright’s real experiences: after a frustrating visit with her own mother and one of the real leeches, Tofte wrote out her experience as self-therapy and then realized her writings were a project with clear potential.
In the talkback after the show on May 16th, Amy Tofte spoke about the difficulty of getting new plays produced, but the ease of getting public readings, which easily changes the way you write, so that the play becomes more of a radio play than anything else. Doing that is a fatal mistake: “if it doesn’t demand, if it’s not breathing something, you’re losing the theatricality.” My favorite aspect of BloodSuckingLeech is how it displays all the unique techniques of its own particular art form; no radio play here. The play makes use of live meta humor, characters frequently talk to the audience, physical humor plays a large role, and transitions between time and place all work through the imaginative seamlessness that live theater is uniquely equipped to create.
The tension of the play is between Erica’s struggle to protect her mother without destroying her agency, while Martha tries to drown out her loneliness and fears of mortality by pretending the leeches love her for who she is. Dylan Thomas’s poem is quoted several times, “Do not go gentle into that good night/ rage, rage against the dying of the light.” One of the questions BloodSuckingLeech asks is how do you actually do that: how do you find the balance between despair and frenzied denial?
The themes are heavy and almost universally relatable; while many people don’t have children, most have parents, and we need to care for them as they age. Even those of us who are too young to deal with this issue yet see our parents and grandparents dealing with this. Mortality comes for us all, whether or not we have children to care for us in the future. Somehow this theme of aging and familial duty isn’t common in contemporary arts. Exhausting responsibility to elderly parents and discussion of non-glamourous mortality may not be sexy, but they are universal and inextricably linked to love and the human condition.
All this could make for a grueling, if edifying play, but Tofte’s clever humor makes it hilarious without dulling the play’s bite. The audacity of the leeches got laugh after laugh. My absolute favorite scene is when Erika meets Niko for the first time, talking as they fold laundry. Niko’s greedy sob stories abound with inconsistencies, and each time that Erika catches them out in a straightforward fashion, new stories and reasons are hatched. This conversation in the play is based on an actual conversation that Tofte had with one of the real leeches. Tofte uses humor as a coping mechanism, which is what gives BloodSuckingLeech such comic success. The quality of her authentic disbelief at the absurdity of the leeches’ shameless greed is delightful and contagious.
Tofte deftly sidesteps any self-aggrandizement, self-pity, or self-hagiography in the fictionalization of her own story. She presents Erika as a good daughter, loving and taking responsibility for her mother while still having mixed emotions and motives. During the talkback the playwright was happy to speak about her play in many aspects, treating us as a sort of proactive focus group, while remaining mostly private about the details of her real-life experience with her mother and scammers.
Tofte said that she will continue to tweak the show a bit more, and hopes to find a home for a full-fledged production. While the play is not technically finished, the version I saw feels complete, except for possibly a few minor moments of repetitive arguing between Erika and Martha. But then, that might not be accidental; how many of our arguments repeat and repeat while we’re fighting? It reminded me of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, where recurring lines aren’t redundancies, but accurate representations of actual thought processes.
Performances of BloodSuckingLeech were at the Noah Liff Opera Center, where the stage was small but the many seats were full. The stage is a rough triangle that points out into the aisle between the rows of chairs. The set was simple and with gauzy white curtains as the only backdrop. A few pieces of furniture set the stage, a working desk to the left, a recliner in the center, and a credenza on the right. The fluid timing and placement of the play have these markers move in and out of importance, but without allowing the audience to lose track of where they are.
The casting was so good. Shannon Hoppe played Erika, with a straightforward sincerity, where her weaknesses and flaws were revealed without damaging our respect for her character. She had an everywoman quality that made her admirable and relatable, and engaged with the audience smoothly.
Rona Carter played the tricky role of Martha the mother, whose foolishness and self-delusion cause all the trouble. Her spunk and unfiltered eagerness for life were charming, but she didn’t allow this to dull her character’s weakness and failures, and refrained from infantilizing her.
The leeches were delightfully openly awful and in distinctive ways. Megan Murphy Chambers as Niko got the most lines, complaining of her hard life and the difficulties of dealing with racism as an immigrant (she’s a white woman from Germany). Chambers’ accent was excellent and easy to understand; she didn’t go in for wearying “z”s for “th”s like Heimlich in A Bug’s Life, but speaks in the separated and rounded speech that has been the accent of Germans and Austrians that I have known. Her constant sob stories communicated with round faux-earnest eyes got laugh after laugh. Meggan Utech got to shine as the major physical comedy element in the play, including a hilarious moment where she gets sucked into a credenza. She played the most roles, and made up for her smaller amount of time on the stage by her rambunctious energy and memorable moments.
Amy Tofte impressed me, as did Ingram New Works for facilitating the project and the Nashville Repertory Theatre’s for giving such an excellent performance. I hope BloodSuckingLeech returns to Nashville, and I look forward to more wonderful productions from everyone involved!
Be sure to get tickets for June 6th, when Ingram New Works presents the first-ever staged reading of Lauren Gunderson’s Pride and Prejudice: An Ardent New Musical.
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A Nashville native and MTSU graduate, Grace Krenz is a reader, a writer, and an arts enthusiast. She lives in Nashville with her husband and two children.
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