When you roll up at Little Egg, the cozy breakfast spot in Prospect Heights, you are offered first a content warning and then a mug of soup. It’s not your typical brunch fare, but right now, the kitchen is serving theater. The play you’re about to see — Jeana Scotti’s oh, Honey, the inaugural production by the new Brooklyn company Ugly Face, founded by Scotti and actor Maia Karo — contains mentions of sexual assault and addiction. The soup contains tomatoes — and, I was quickly assured by the person who handed it to me, “no allergens!” It’s a sweet gesture, and, more pointedly, a nod to the story at hand: Four suburban women meet for their monthly diner date with “the girls,” attended to by a put-upon server, who suppresses her inner life as she fetches them salad with dressing on the side, special monkfruit sweetener, and “iced tea with half lemon juice … and a little sugar” (not an Arnold Palmer).
If these ladies sound insufferable, give it a moment. Ugly Face’s mission begins with “celebrating flaws and reclaiming what was once shameful,” and Scotti has written a stinging, funny, and compassionate play — with, under Carsen Joenk’s smart direction, moments of compelling height and lilt — that’s about much more than brunch. The women, after all, are “not friends”; so says one of them, Lu (Katherine Renee Cortez), a tight-lipped prep-school principal with as little patience as gluten tolerance. “We can’t talk to real friends about this crap,” she continues, prim and merciless. “They already talk enough shit about us behind our backs.” This crap is the active minefield that Lu, Bianca (Jamie Ragusa), Vicki (Karo, nailing a specific brand of kinda-all-over-the-place, Aquarius-hippie-mom energy), and Sarah (Mara Stephens) pick their way through every time they meet: the looming, suffocating fact that each one of them has a college-age son who’s been accused of sexual assault.
Scotti’s play draws on a 2017 Times article about a real group of mothers in like circumstances who met regularly at a diner in the Twin Cities suburbs to “share notes and commiserate.” It’s a chilling piece, full of eerie demonstrations of the rooms one can wall off within one’s own conscience (“In my generation,” says one of the moms, “what these girls are going through was never considered assault. It was considered, ‘I was stupid and I got embarrassed’”); it also provides Scotti with plenty of fact-is-creepier-than-fiction fodder. In oh, Honey — cleverly named for the exclamation of condescending condolence that the mothers constantly deploy with each other — Sarah originally assembled the lunch bunch by reaching out to fellow moms in her online FACE group. Yes, that’s “FACE,” not Facebook, and yes, Families Advocating for Campus Equality is a real thing. Taking her cue from this kind of misleadingly righteous and euphemistic messaging, Scotti weaves tense little waltzes of activist-speak, pleasantries, and passive aggression for her central quartet. They’re always dancing right along a cliff’s edge, less in solidarity than in competition: Whose kid is most clearly the victim here? Who will survive the vertiginous trek through trauma without looking down, breaking a sweat, or otherwise revealing evidence of the catastrophic shake-up to her family’s carefully crafted life?
With women like this, sympathy can be just as damning as outright attack. Stephens’s needy, high-strung Sarah obsessively posts kiddie pictures of her son Max in a fruitless quest to remind the world of how cute and innocent he once was, but she responds with a dragon’s wrath to any “like” from a certain old high-school acquaintance. “Jillian,” she fumes, channeling late-stage Daenerys in crazytown. “She has this perfect daughter Chelsea she’s always posting perfect filtered photos of, with her long hair, making valedictorian and becoming a stupid vet … She keeps saying things like, ‘So sorry hun,’ ‘If you need anything’ …” Sarah’s the closest to cracking because her son is the closest to trial — when she’s in the bathroom and Bianca whispers scandalously, “She told me he got put on antidepressants,” it’s among the funniest-not-funny moments in the show — but she’s also, both where Max is concerned and beyond, simply desperate to care and be shown care in return. She’s the only one who looks the group’s server, Mari (Carmen Berkeley), in the eyes and calls her by name — albeit in the strained, slightly performative style of a good liberal lady who needs us to know that she knows waiters are people too. But for all that, Sarah and Mari share a kind of rapport. Sarah’s always early — she lives closest to the lunch joint, specifically picked for its distance from everyone else’s neighborhoods and lives — and she isn’t the only one full of things unsaid and needs unmet. As we learn in a wonderful, out-of-time soliloquy in which Berkeley gets to go wild under red lights while slathering herself in rejected, pre-dressed salad and crawling across Little Egg’s bar counter, Mari is secretly struggling away at that “most selfish kind of job, really, the one thing that focuses only on you … [being] a writer.”
When I saw oh, Honey, it was “community night,” and the compact space was packed with both theater and service-industry folks. That Venn diagram is, of course, pretty close to a circle, and perhaps Lu, Bianca, Vicki, and Sarah should think twice before spilling their guts in front of someone like Mari. Chances are, the person handing you your iced tea and your check is dealing with their own peaks and valleys of ambition and rejection — they are, at best, judging you; at worst, immortalizing you in print.
Scotti sketches all her characters with a combination of emotional detail, which naturally engenders empathy, and a level of cool remove that keeps us from passionately throwing our allegiances around. As writer’s avatar, Mari, for all her blending into the furniture, is no egoless saint, and things leap out of Sarah, Vicki, and Bianca’s wounded, defensive hearts that can’t help but rattle ours. Even Lu, most closed and supercilious of the bunch, has weird, troubled reservoirs of shame that gradually start to froth and bubble. And, despite the chest-tightening heaviness of oh, Honey’s material, Scotti and Joenk find plenty theatrical lift — especially in a number of wicked little sequences where “the girls” jump out of context and, atop a cheesy soundtrack and speaking into forks as microphones, perform Real Housewives versions of themselves. “I’m Bianca,” purrs Ragusa with a wink and a hair flip, “and I may make the sweetest Funfetti cupcakes around. But don’t get it twisted — there’s more spice than sugar in this cupcake.”
Later, Scotti brings her own trope back home with a jab to the gut. “Fucking Jillian,” screeches Sarah in response to her frenemy’s ever-present comments of support. “She probably has an alert set up for you,” snarks Lu, and when Sarah, almost in tears, asks why, Bianca delivers the finisher: “Because, Sarah, you’re entertainment for her. You’re her Real Housewives.” With oh, Honey, Scotti embarks on a sharp, thoughtful excavation not simply of the ways in which our own suffering becomes a kind of reality-obscuring forcefield, but of how from the outside, that shield, and the whole mess of delusion and devastation behind it, can become just another screen.
