RECOMMENDED
The unprecedented rise of E.L. James’ “Fifty Shades of Grey” series could not have happened five years ago. The trilogy, which is essentially an overdrawn romance novel spiced up with acceptable kink, is a hugely popular indulgence on those nifty e-readers—Kindles, Nooks and Crannies. The anonymity that a bland, plastic tablet affords was never available on those garish trade paperbacks adorned with a shirtless Fabio, hair blowing in the wind. But today, a businessman on the train, dapper and desirably careless on the outside, on the inside, might be reeling over the breakup of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey. That coverless e-reader allows for an active intersection of fantasy and reality, which are, both, in tandem, becoming darker by the minute. As these two worlds become acquainted, however, is there a chance of monstrous collision?
Paula Vogel wrote her one-act play, “Hot ‘N’ Throbbing,” in 1994, thirteen years before the advent of the Kindle and in the days before a consumer-friendly internet. But beyond a few loud-and-clear nineties expressions—for example, “Fudge!” instead of its, now milquetoast, root expletive—”Hot ‘N’ Throbbing” is prophetic in its contemporary relevance, disconcertingly warning of the dangers of our fantasies gone awry. An eighty-minute work every bit as pressing and entertaining as Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize winner, “How I Learned To Drive,” “Hot ‘N’ Throbbing,” with frank, no-holds-barred depiction, imagines a catastrophic convergence of pornography, escapism, family life and domestic violence on a single evening in a woman’s home. Interrobang Theatre Project, guns ablaze, at the Raven Theatre, dives headfirst into the play’s challenging themes, and offers a rare production in which every element onstage is as robust and capable as every other.
