SEXLESS IN THE CITY

Have you ever been with a guy who won’t shut up and just enjoy the blow job? That’s what it’s like to sit through Ashley Griffin’s new two-person play, The Opposite of Love, which premiered last year off-Broadway, and is now having its first West Coast performances at the Hudson Backstage Theatre.

Eloise, played by Griffin, is a virgin living in New York City. A graduate student in her thirties and wearing a little red dress, she has hired an affordable and handsome rent man, Will, played by Evan Strand, to come to her apartment to transactionally take her virginity. To him, it’s just another gig, but Eloise has too many hang-ups and complaints, chief of which is that she’s been ostracized from her friends, all in relationships, for being single. They instead agree that she’ll pay him to visit weekly and work with her to break through her massive sexual walls.

Endless talking follows. Eloise puts up hurdle after hurdle: the dangers of hooking up as a woman, fear that she’ll like sex, her uncle’s sexual abuse when she was little, sex being the price for a relationship, all men are awful. It goes on and on. Add some statistics and her lectures would be indistinguishable from an opinion in some progressive rag. Will responds by becoming more and more like a boyfriend, in addition to her sexual tutor; he even opens up about his own life. In contrast, the more we learn about Eloise, the more she reveals herself to be cold, judgy, and shallow, whether it’s the unread Barnes and Noble bonded-leather edition of Great Expectations conspicuously on display, making fun of Will for not knowing how to pronounce “Monet,” or how she tries to spin Will’s fond memory of losing his virginity into a rape story. I can already imagine her reaction to Summer of ’42 (1971).

It’s all so tiresome, in spite of being under 90 minutes. You know the kind of play that has dialog like, “You know that place somewhere between sleep and awake?” This is that kind of play. There’s a scene where Eloise dreamily recounts a romantic scene in Stage Beauty (2004), but talking about a romantic movie is not romantic. The Opposite of Love is firmly in the “tell, don’t show” camp.

All this builds to the show’s selling point: an ending, really an epilogue, that upends everything that came before it, revealing a play that hates its audience. So, this is actually a puzzle play. There are hints scattered throughout, but they’re quickly glossed over and forgotten; as an audience, we are never kept on our toes, so the ending arrives like being spit in the face. I would be tempted to go back and rationalize, but the play is executed at the surface level, leading me to take the ending as existing only for shock value. I admit, I perked up, as the relationship finally got interesting with some genuine conflict, but, at the 80-minute mark and with only a few minutes to go, it wasn’t enough to make the play worthwhile.

For a play that’s all about sex, Melora Marshall’s direction is surprisingly chaste, displaying little in the way of lustful passion and intense horniness, which could have helped cover some of the weaker writing. Eloise was hungry enough for sex to subscribe to an escort, but Griffin plays her so frigidly, I would be surprised if Eloise masturbates. Will is an escort; his sexual prowess should be palpable to all in his vicinity. Instead, Strand plays him as just a nice guy. The dramatic thrust is inert. Whereas the question in many stories is, “Will they or won’t they?,” here it’s, “When will she?” We needed heavy breathing, eroticism. We needed to be turned on. Even when the play finally gave us a fairly effective oral sex scene, it was still weird. So, this virginal woman, who needs a meaningful connection to get in the mood for sex, with a professional to guide her, skips kissing in favor of getting on her knees first? This makes no sense. Frankly, much of the on-stage sexual action, fully clothed, mind you, was disjointed and unsexy (Celina Lee Surniak is the intimacy director). A final note on the direction: the Hudson Backstage is a challenging space with columns giving most people obstructed views. Marshall kept the action almost exclusively in the center and stage right, leading my friends and me, seated in prime center spots, to constantly fight the column in order to see the actors.

Tech specs are adequate, if not very deep. Omar Madkour’s lighting is most creative during the hot-and-cold scene changes, but doesn’t exploit that Eloise’s apartment has a jaw-dropping 180-degree view of Central Park. Scenic designers You Chen Zhang and Joyce Hong are perhaps most in tune with the play. Their minimal apartment with strange selection and arrangement of books had me curious from the start. The left half of the stage was devoted to a translucent curtain, behind which Griffin changed outfits. Alas, another missed opportunity. Not even a shadow striptease.

Sage Barrie is on the right track with her costumes, even though they come up short. I like how they show aspects of Eloise’s character: that she went to Yale, how a pair of heels asserts her dominance, but, for someone who casually hands out wads of hundred-dollar bills, her clothes look cheap. On the other hand, Barrie’s square costumes for Will say “generic straight guy,” with no indication that he’s an escort. As nice as they are, all we get, save for a minute when he takes off his shirt near the end, are the bottom halves of Strand’s biceps. When you’re selling, you have to accentuate the goods. Composer and sound designer Marshall McDaniel provided some choice interludes. However, it was his sweet, earnest music leading into the consummation that convinced me to take everything up to that point at face value, rather than reading into any hints that might have foreshadowed the cruel ending.

The framework is there to explore themes of class, power, honesty, gender imbalances. The play even mentions them explicitly at the end. However, it doesn’t actually explore those themes and how they affect the characters’ relationship, leaving us less fulfilled than TLC’s trashy and perplexingly clueless Virgins.

photos by Matt Kamikura Photgraphy

The Opposite of Love
Hudson Backstage Theatre, 6359 Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood
95 minutes, no intermission
Thurs-Sat at 7:30; Sun at 4
ends on August 31, 2025
for tickets ($40) visit Onstage411

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA