The Acton Off-Broadway Theatre Review: Abigail Duclos’s Blood Orange
by Acton
The new horror play Blood Orange (writer Abigail Duclos, director Vernice Miller) rolls out like a sleepover legend told by flashlight under your neighbor’s pilled polyester blanket: there once were some latchkey kids who started their own cult, worshipping a thing in the refrigerator.
The two girls are perhaps 15 or 16 years old. Faye (Maria Müller) demands that Eden (Ana Moioli) punch her—hard. She says she wants a mark severe enough that her newly widowed, catatonic mother will notice her, but there’s a masochistic yearning to her voice, too. Deciding which part of her body would best suit a bruise, Faye displays herself for the bashful Eden. Dancing around the subject of just where exactly Eden should touch Faye, they speak with the halting, guarded tempo of teenagers barely able to keep their emotions in check.
Faye erupts with an unsexy announcement: she’s keeping a dead animal in a paper bag in the refrigerator, and it’s been giving her gifts. Eden takes the news in stride, the way a curious child might react to story hour, and Faye becomes an evangelist of the powers of the rotting thing to heal or hurt, if you just pray hard enough. Their mutual enthusiasm for the secret in the refrigerator builds into a frenzy of quasi-religious discovery and invention, and Faye improvises sacred rituals and ecstatic dances with deadly seriousness. Eventually, Faye intuits that the thing requires a sacrifice, and her (slightly) more mature friend Georgia (Giorgia Valenti) begins looking like a vulnerable candidate.
One of Blood Orange’s strengths is its depiction of the power of imagination in young adults straddling the line between stuffed animals and driver’s licenses, and Maria Müller, Ana Moioli, and Giorgia Valenti each create unique expressions of teen anxiety. Müller is as scary and unpredictable as Faye, the attention-craving cult leader. Moioli’s Eden is a daffy but unsettling creation who packs an excellent stage punch. Valenti plays a conventionally popular girl with an inchoate quality that makes us fear for her. And Doreen Oliver is startlingly effective as Faye’s much-discussed but little-seen mother, Mariah—her shock entrance elicited an actual shriek from the audience.
With its inward-looking, claustrophobic atmosphere, Blood Orange, now running at The Jeffrey & Paula Gural Theatre of A.R.T./New York, reminded me of a Creepypasta story or the movie “I Saw the TV Glow“. It meanders a bit, but casts an eerie, hazy spell, eventually building to a weird, whirligig ritual (choreographed by associate director Amelia Rose Estrada) and a satisfying, Grand Guignol climax.
