I’ll have what she’s having (or not): Queens of Romance, a Fringe review

In Trevor Schmidt’s latest play for 100% More Girls, we’re in a pink-hued world (designer: Schmidt), at the finale event of the Hopeless Romantics’ seventh annual Love and Romance conference. The Queens of Romance panel gathers onstage three celebrity writers, stars of the romance novel, to discuss their craft, their writing history, their aspirations, their works-in-progress.

As introduced by the nervous moderator and fangirl Missy short for Melissa (Schmidt, in a sparkly pink tiered dress and pink runners), they are a high-contrast trio, and their costumes (by Schmidt) are a shorthand character sketch in themselves.

The elderly Nausea Wildenheart (Jason Hardwick), the grande dame of the genre, encrusted with rhinestones, has 723 titles (so far) in her archive, including In His Arms, Her Heart’s Wild Journey, and Tender is the Dusk. She’s (very) old-school: in her best-sellers beautiful people — one well-heeled man, one dewy young woman in the 16 to 21 bracket, find each other, fall in love, get married, make love, live happily ever after.

Janet van Herpen (Michelle Todd), in a flashy silk jumpsuit and draped in gold accessories, has ‘liberated’ female characters who have lots of sex with lots of men, and freewheeling commitment-free sex-in-the-city lives. Her work includes Trophy Wives of Minor Astronauts.

Karin Cutler (Jake Tkaczyk with amusingly corporate hair) is a PhD in gender studies, whose romance output, as she briskly describes, includes queer, gender-fluid, and polyamorous characters. There is a difference, as she points out in exasperation to her stage companions, between dominatrixes and sex workers.

There are witty lines in the script’s delineation of these stereotypes (no Schmidt script is without them). The novel titles are funny, and Dame Nausea’s intermittent deafness occasions some amusing misunderstandings. And top-drawer actors commit to drawing, convincingly, the cartoon portraits. But nothing really happens onstage — either between the characters or their pre-cast, unbridgeable points of view. Arguments among stereotypes tend to be setups; the antagonisms are pre-ordained and hard to animate.

There’s no arguing with Missy’s conciliatory, and worthy, position that there’s room in every genre (including the so-called romance novel), for all kinds of writing and points of view. But there’s a theatrical shortfall when entrenched positions are just set forth onstage.