So there’s this nice Catholic girl. Raised in the Midwest by relentlessly religious parents. Schooled by nuns. And obediently “saving herself for marriage.”
Now living in New York, site of “Sex and the City,” she bemoans the fact that she has “neither the sex nor the clothes” of the ladies of that TV dramedy. And, what’s more, on her upcoming birthday she will probably be the only 25-year old virgin in this, or any other, city.
Thus begins Annie Hendy’s earnest odyssey, based loosely on her own sex-challenged adventures, which she has thoughtfully documented in her play “The Catholic Girl’s Guide to Losing Your Virginity.”
Hendy, playing the lead as a girl named Lizzy, records her frenzied search for a sex partner, which isn’t easy. The men she chases are either reluctant, for various reasons, or so uncontrollably libidinous that they put her off. And the chase continues for about 90 minutes, without intermission or a change of pace.
But oddly enough, this one-note tune is refreshingly entertaining. Hendy is charming and hilarious. And she has her insightful moments: acknowledging her fears, her loneliness, and her sense of failure.
The play, however, belongs to Cyrus Alexander, who turns in a performance that will take your breath away! Alexander plays all the men she encounters — and there are a gazillion of them. Everyone from the local priest (“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned”) to a narcissistic weightlifter, to her best friend and confidant, Jeremy, to all the losers she meets at a speed-dating event. While she ruminates about love he changes costumes, accessories, hats, sweaters, and accents, dressing and undressing in a dark corner of the stage in time to reappear as her next potential partner.
As her friend Jeremy, Alexander gets off some pretty funny lines. “Did you do the Jew?” he asks. And “Go to H&R Block,” he advises. “Those guys never get laid!” And she moans, “My priest has a better sex life than me!”
They spar in cliches. “You gotta keep looking.” “When you’re not looking, he’ll come.” “If you build it, they will come.” But by the time she gets around to approaching him as a possible sex partner, Jeremy has fallen in love with somebody else, whom he eventually marries. And Lizzy serves as “best man” at his wedding.
It’s a delightful play, saved from being static by the fluid direction of Eli Gonda, whose last directorial stint was the current Broadway production of “Cyrano de Bergerac.”
The lighting, too, was critical, and deftly designed by Michael Gilliam, who has won Ovation Awards for lighting the Los Angeles productions of “Gershwin Alone” and “Big River.”
Costume designer Cynthia Obsenares kept the two principals in the same basic outfits most of the time, but transformed them with the addition of hats and accessories, a priest’s robe, a nun’s wimple, an old-fashioned sleeveless undershirt.
The costume changes were facilitated by Tom Buderwitz’s set design: Lizzy’s apartment, with wall-to-wall shelving that held the various clothing accessories along with her girlish tchotchkes. She was constantly running horizontally across the stage, a platform covered with innumerable piles of big white satin pillows that served as lounges, a bed, and, in one case, pillows — good for a pillow fight.
“The Catholic Girl’s Guide to Losing Your Virginity” premiered in Los Angeles in 2006. It then went on to Cincinnati (Hendy’s home town), where it sold out for every performance. It has returned to Los Angeles for its current run at the Pico Playhouse (formerly the Century City Playhouse), a newly refurbished and extraordinarily comfortable little theater at 10508 W. Pico Blvd., just west of the Rancho Park Golf Course. It will run Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 8 p.m. through March 1.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 18, 2008. Read the original PDF.