Oft-produced playwright Adam Rapp's The Edge of Our Bodies (his Finer Noble Gasses was in the 26th Humana Festival) is a mesmerizing, beautifully written monologue for the astonishing Catherine Combs, perfect in every way as Bernadette, a precocious 16-year-old who takes off without permission from her New England prep school to make a surprise visit to her 19-year-old New York boyfriend to tell him she's pregnant.
As she reads aloud from her journal and later drops it to wander the stage, Combs portrays people she encounters, including boyfriend Michael's elderly father, a female bartender, a 44-year-old man who picks her up at the bar, and the character she plays in Jean Genet's The Maids at her school. She's painfully self-aware throughout, saying at one point "I am living someone else's life the life of some stupid desperate girl in a raincoat who likes to tease and lie to strangers." Rapp directed his intermissionless play.
