Review: Sock and Buskin's The Executrix Defies Description
Explaining the plot of The Executrix, written and directed by Emma Horwitz ‘20 MFA for this year’s Writing is Live festival, is a pretty thankless task. Not thankless because the show is somehow plotless; there’s a plot. A former lover is pushed out of a window. A dinner party is planned. Said former lover returns, understandably peeved. But the narrative, in Horwitz’s bizarrely specific and inexplicably hilarious Executrix, is very rarely the point of watching.
At times, what’s compelling in this tight, hourlong piece is how Horwitz cheekily stages her own work. Susan (Jihan Haddad ‘21 MFA) “falls” out of a window by putting an electric fan to her face and letting her hair blow wildly. Louise (Hannah Van Sciver ‘21 MFA) seems to icily pop out of nowhere when she makes her entrance. The stage is lit almost entirely with two spotlights that follow Susan and Louise around Vaudeville-style.
Yet, the real reason that Executrix compels, the thing that pulled me in every time a bizarre turn threatened to lose me, is the manner of speech that Horwitz adopts for her two leads. Louise and Susan speak somewhere at the nexus of robots, New York socialites, and Gregorian monks. They find— nay, invent— a cadence all their own, and persistently drop in their own idiosyncratic vocabulary until the audience is convinced that “Val Salvio’s” and “straight-married” are phrases they hear every day. It is a bold exercise in language-building, and Van Sciver and Haddad prove themselves perfectly fluent. The audience is drawn to laugh at this world they don’t understand, then to laugh at themselves when they find that they begin to understand it.
Infrequent interruptions are made by the irate Irene (Clare Koenig ‘22 MFA) and the art dealer It’s Not Peter (Liam MacDougall ‘22 MFA), to little recollectable effect. Houseplants are tossed around, a fake bloody hand appears, and Susan (or is it Ida?) ends up under a table. But it is a testament to The Executrix that this requisite MFA avant-garde-ness isn’t off-putting. It feels more shared and less supercilious than the typical experimental fare; more Wasn’t It Wacky That We All Experienced This Weird Thing Together? and less You Didn’t Understand That, Did You, You Stupid Theatregoer?
The plot isn’t remotely the point of The Executrix because it evaporates just as quickly as it has arrived once the audience leaves the theatre. What remains is the feeling of having entered strange territory and come back, harrowingly, intact. It’s a frustrating, rewarding trip.