Review: The Hero Leaves One Tooth leaves something to be desired
Written by Erica J. Brennan, directed by Cam Turnbull
Review by Charlotte Smee
Spoilers ahead!
Vagina dentata – or “chompussy”, as my housemate Isla has dubbed it – is Latin for “toothed vagina”. A myth that exists in many cultures, the term was first coined by Sigmund Freud; known for his overdependence on body parts to psychoanalyse people. Originally more of a cautionary tale for men to “beware where they put their dicks lest they lose them” (thanks Vice), Erica J. Brennan has taken the trope and set it at a modern-day dinner party including all your favourite guests: vaginal-tooth-extracting dentist (gynecologist?), foreign-artist-type, sexy-fake-Russian and film-bro-who-burns-the-dinner.
The play opens with Neeve (Kira-Che Heelan), our “hero” that we don’t know yet, out running at night (assisted by David Molloy’s video design that wouldn’t be out of place in an art gallery theatre). Eerie sound design by Zac Saric swells, Neeve pulls out her keys, and suddenly there’s a blackout. In comes a band of folky performers – complete with cajon (box drum) and accordion – to sing us some context.
The opening song, aptly named “Dentata”, has hilariously foreboding music and lyrics by Jake Nielsen. A troupe of performers (who later play dinner party guests) get increasingly ferocious in their refrains, and the song ends with the gruesome image: “clutching a puddle of blood in your jeans”. It’s something like Richard O’Brien’s “Science Fiction/Double Feature” that opens The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a bit of a cryptic song that hints at the rest of the story and sets the tone for creepy musical fun.
After this opening, the abrupt switch into the dinner party reality of Neeve and her boyfriend Felix (Michael McStay, aforementioned film-bro-who-burns-the-dinner) is a difficult one for an audience’s brains to handle. As The Hero Leaves One Tooth goes on, it collects more “styles” that introduce their own “rules” and tropes. It begins as an arthouse horror film, moves to a musical, and then drops you into a dinner party play (in the style of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). Running underneath these styles is the science fiction-esque idea that women have started growing teeth in their vaginas as a defence mechanism against sexual assault.
Some of the rules of these styles start to clash with each other: sci-fi usually requires a lot of exposition to explain the strange phenomena that it is essential to the plot, and dinner party plays drop an audience right into a situation (much like their guests) and forces them to figure out what’s going on as the dinner party falls apart. In this play, it means that the logic of this modern-day vagina dentata is a little too secret to be fully explained, and it also doesn’t have the benefit of being used as a “twist” somewhere near the end of the play.
An added musical element further imports the unique suspension of disbelief required to enjoy and expect emotions (and sometimes plot) to be built through song. Songs around the middle of the play, and then at the end, bookend the dinner party tensions. The middle song “Here I Come”, performed by the spooky Cara Whitehouse, features some of the more gruesome video projections, and the more interesting theatrical images. Neeve slowly turns towards the singer, who could be the teeth or something else, as the rest of the party continues in slow motion around her. It’s weird and entrancing to watch but, without further context given to the singer or the lyrics, it’s unclear what it’s telling the audience.
Because of this proliferation of styles, each of the characters becomes a little too transparent in their purpose: Heelan’s Neeve is uncomfortably earnest in her victimhood. Sasha “the Russian” (Claudia Shnier) is a brash foil to the meek Neeve (with artist not-boyfriend Benito in tow), similarly, Gem (Tom Rodgers) is in love with Felix and wants a better, sex-filled life for him (sans teeth). Gynedentist Kadi (Cara Whitehouse) asks Neeve about her “extraction” surgery, and provides some jargon-laced explanations of their job of removing teeth before birth. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, Neeve’s ex-professor and ex-boyfriend Mark (David Woodland) turns up at the door with flowers.
All of this conflict and tension is a recipe for disaster – for the characters, but at times also for the audience. Introducing seven characters in 70 minutes is no small task, and in The Hero Leaves One Tooth, the audience doesn’t have enough time to get to know them further than their tenuous relationships with each other. The characters also don’t have enough time to get deeper than surface quibbles, or bitching about each other in hushed tones. What could have been shocking reveals, become confusing moments that had me quickly backtracking to figure out the connections I’d been presented with.
For example, when Mark enters, we find out that Neeve is cheating on Felix with him. Because Neeve and Felix’s relationship is underdeveloped onstage, this isn’t as shocking as it could be. Instead, it validated my suspicion that they probably shouldn’t have been dating in the first place. Then, Sasha seduces Mark for reasons that are ultimately unclear – after she has flippantly told Neeve that she could “control” her teeth and Neeve should learn the same. Mark enters, sans fingers, in what is a brilliant theatrical image including buckets of stage blood. But this image, paired with Neeve’s despair at not being able to control her vaginal teeth, seems to infer that women’s bodies know when they are having sex that’s morally ambiguous. I don’t think that this is the argument that Brennan is trying to make, but the underdeveloped concepts leave the play’s interpretation a little too open to being filled with untoward assumptions.
The Hero Leaves One Tooth lives between genres – it’s part musical, part dinner-party drama, part sci-fi, part folklore. The only problem is that it packs too much into one play and loses some of its impact along the way. Smashing genres and rules is very important work, and this play certainly smashes a few. A more restrained approach might reveal a stronger throughline that goes beyond the stereotypes and aesthetics it presents because, well, who wouldn’t want to see a play about “chompussy”?
The Hero Leaves One Tooth played at KXT on Broadway from 14 - 29 July. Find information here.
Images by Roger Stonehouse
Charlotte is the editor of Kaleidoscope Arts Journal, a little enby and a big mess. Their friends regularly worry that they might overdose on theatre.
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