A group of women wield retribution on the man who wronged them: eyes are gouged, swords brandished, a gun put to the back of his head. These grindhouse scenarios explode out of Anna Ouyang Moench’s play but it is no Kill Bill caper. Instead, Moench pastiches samurai, horror and gangster genres while exposing the hollowness of such wild revenge fantasies for real survivors of abuse.
There’s a lot else going on in Man of God, which probes themes of online and offline privacy, consent, abuse of power, bulimia and sex trafficking. Moench gets straight into it as, in a Bangkok hotel, we meet four Korean American Christian student missionaries who find a hidden camera in their bathroom. Their fear and fury deepen when they realise it must have been installed by the pastor who is leading them on the trip.
It recalls the troubling dynamic between the team and their coach in Clare Barron’s Dance Nation as the teenagers have a reckoning with their outwardly benevolent elder whose hugs, they queasily conclude, have always lasted a little too long. The setup expands into a wider consideration of life lived under not just the male gaze but the eyes of God who, as one girl reflects with terror, “sees everything”.
This central metaphor is more potent than that of the emotional baggage that gets packed away in the anonymous hotel room, initially littered with half-finished drinks, toiletries and eye masks. The glass-panelled corner bathroom in Se Oh’s set design effectively makes us voyeurs too.
Like Barron in Dance Nation, Moench zones in on contrasts on the brink of adulthood – one girl has brought a cuddly bunny on the trip, another raids the minibar looking for booze. In a play that is a tad too tidy, the students are initially classified before gaining complexity – there’s naive Samantha (Shirley Chen), rebellious Mimi (Erin Rae Li), bookish Jen (Emma Galbraith) and the devout Kyung-Hwa (Ji-young Yoo, the standout star in the richest role). Their relationships with each other are volatile but, in the most moving scene of Maggie Burrows’ frenetic production, three of the girls compassionately fill in the blanks when the other gives a faltering account of the shame, guilt and gut-wrenching pragmatism she has shown in the wake of abuse.
Unfolding over 90 interval-free minutes in real time in the single location, there are pithy observations on Instagrammed lives, school pressures and self-worth, though little wider exploration of systemic abuse and patriarchal misconduct within the church. The revenge fantasy sequences are realised with style and dark comedy but they strain to contain the intimate experiences of everyday sexism shared by the students within them.
Albert Park’s Pastor is silkily malevolent if not quite chilling enough in his authority and while the ending hits a note of grim realism it can’t help but also feel anticlimactic. Nevertheless, this is a pungent account of modern malaise and a hymn to burgeoning feminist resolve that finally finishes a full run at the Geffen Playhouse, more than two years after it was halted by Covid.
On which note, for this Brit passing through: how reassuring to watch a play among a fully masked audience complying with strict Covid policies including vaccination verification. It’s a complete contrast to the muddle we’ve been left with in the UK.
At Williamstown theatre festival, Massachusetts, 5-16 July
