To See or Not to See: The Edge of Our Bodies

16 year-old Bernadette is many things: a child of a marriage on the rocks, a boarding school student, a wannabe writer, a wannabe actress, a dedicated girlfriend, and, sometimes, a liar. In The Edge of Our Bodies, we get a quick coming-of-age story.

Bernadette has ditched school for the day. She’s traveling from Connecticut to Brooklyn in order to surprise her 19 year old boyfriend, Michael, with the news that she’s pregnant. She never actually encounters Michael, but along the way she encounters a whole cast of characters. She meets an old man on the train; she chats with Michael’s terminally ill father; she picks up a much older man at a dive bar and goes to his seedy hotel with him. In each scenario, Bernadette is learning a sad life lesson about disappointment.

Written by Adam Rapp and directed by Jacqueline Stone, The Edge of Our Bodies is, at times, a bit too ambitious. With overtures of another East Coast, private school student coming-of-age story (like, say, Catcher in the Rye), there are lines that only a very smart, world-weary character would say. Additionally, the set creates a strange dissonance between what is happening and what we see. Behind a scrim almost the entire time, we see a bench, a wolf skin rug, a recorder, cubical shelves, and red lights. By the end of The Edge of Our Bodies, we realize it is the set for a school play, but it is somewhat puzzling up until that point.

Actress Caroline Malloy (playing Bernadette) does a wonderful job at keeping this almost solo-show engaging as we listen to Bernadette share scenes from her life via her diary. She jumps into different characters easily, but without losing the idea that Bernadette is the one embodying them and telling the story.

TUTA Theatre’s production of The Edge of Our Bodies is at 59E59 Theaters. For more information, click here.

Photo by Anthony LaPenna