“Wife/Worker/Whore” is a wild, woolly, occasionally wacky and often worrisome megadrama making its East Coast premiere at the community-based Hole in the Wall Theater in New Britain.
The reason for the play’s multi-slashed title is quickly revealed. “Wife/Worker/Whore” consists of three plays with their own characters. They start separately with no sense of how they might intersect, then they start to loosely connect. The “Worker” play unfolding on the right side of the stage is about a female police officer whose department is investigating a prostitution ring. The madam and a prostitute from the drama in the middle of the stage are the ones under investigation and are the main “Whore” designation in “Wife/Worker/Whore.” The most “Wife”-oriented of the three sections is about newlyweds who are clearly not in sync with each other’s emotional and material needs.
The words in the title can be appropriately doled out into their separate parts, but there’s a little of each word in all of them. “Wife/Worker/Whore” is largely about issues affecting women in the workplace, but themes of adultery, criminality, harassment and abuse are also constant. The show is not necessarily an indictment of any particular gender, job choice, lifestyle, social status or belief system. It’s mainly about needs and choices, how flimsy the justifications for them can seem and also how people can feel pushed into these decisions by profound social inequities.
Hole in the Wall Theater, a 50-year-old New Britain institution run as a collective, is known for taking risks on dark material that wouldn’t get considered at most other community theaters. “Wife/Worker/Whore” is a big project. There are nine people in the cast spread out over three separate main scenarios. There are no set changes, but there are three simultaneous sets and a lot of light cues which shift from one set to another.
“Wife/Worker/Whore” is both written and directed by Kirsten Easton-Hazzaa, who writes in her program notes that the script was first produced as her thesis project for a master’s degree in playwriting from Southern Illinois University. As is common with large-cast shows at small community-based theaters, there’s not a consistent quality of acting. Nobody’s attempting deep naturalism here, but that surface-level melodrama actually helps the production a bit, since it makes its inevitable shocking revelations more matter-of-fact and not over-the-top or gratuitous. Some of the actors are cartoonish, while others are seriously underplaying. It’s a crap shoot, but the spread-out scripts somehow can contain all these differing styles.
In some ways, “Wife/Worker/Whore” is a two-hour bout of cringyness. It shifts from one uncomfortable situation to another. The deeper the characters are into their troubled circumstances, the more awkward it is to watch. Of course, that’s the point of the play, to wake the audience up to some disturbing realities. The whole script needs pruning and tightening, partly because it gets its main points across from the get-go, but when it’s really cooking it can be an engrossing piece of political theater in the long winding tradition of Clifford Odet’s “Waiting for Lefty” or some of Eugene O’Neill’s early one-acts.
The three-part juggling act is a good demonstration of Easton-Hazzaa’s strong structural sense. There’s plenty of good theatrical dialogue as well, like “I was a whore long before I made it my profession, is that what you’re saying?!” and “You slept with Frankie so he wouldn’t break up with you!” “Wife/Worker/Whore” has standard dramatic stories to tell about relationships and jobs and various combinations of both, with the standard dramatic plot twists and surprises. But it is also an extended meditation on oppression, injustice and inequality.
“Wife/Worker/Whore” runs through Feb. 11 at the Hole in the Wall Theater, 116 Main St., New Britain. Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. plus a matinee on Feb. 5 at 2 p.m. $25, $20 students and seniors. hitw.org.
Reach reporter Christopher Arnott at carnott@courant.com.
