The Healy family of Broadway’s Jagged Little Pill confront a plethora of problems, but they’re having a day at the beach compared to the crowd at Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven Off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company. Stephen Adly Guirgis’s new super-sized comedy-drama contains a stageful of characters—the huge cast numbers 18, a rarity for a straight play on or Off-Broadway—each exploding with their own trauma.
We are in a women’s halfway housing shelter (Narelle Sissons designed the appropriately crumbling set), and as with the Healys, a lot is going on. Sarge, a lesbian army vet, is furious that transgender prostitute Venus is taking a bed which should go to a “real woman.” Sarge’s girlfriend, Bella, a stripper from Baltimore, wants a normal life but Sarge’s alcoholism and anger issues keep getting in the way. Former dancer Wanda, now confined to a wheelchair, refuses to take her medication. Rockaway Rosie still mourns the rejection of her fiance who stole her life savings hidden in a bucket of detergent. Betty refuses to take a bath. Teenagers Melba and Mateo just want to get through high school. Father Miguel and Miss Rivera attempt to run the place, but their own nerves are starting to fray as pressure mounts to close the place. And that’s just a sampling of the multiple goings-on.
As he has done with his numerous previous works including Our Lady of 121st Street, The Motherfucker with the Hat, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Between Riverside and Crazy, Adly Guirgis solidly delivers a brutally honest depiction of vital, struggling people on the edge who speak in hilarious, profanity-laced slang. The script is a riot, but there are so many plot threads and characters that despite John Ortiz’s controlled, muscular direction and stellar performances from the entire company (particularly Elizabeth Canavan’s addled, endearing Rosie, Patrice Johnson Chevannes’ regal Wanda, Liza Colon-Zayas’s hair-trigger, yet vulnerable Sarge, and Elizabeth Rodriguez’s fierce Miss Rivera), it’s nearly impossible to keep them all straight. In addition, the author doesn’t fully develop some of characters or resolve their stories.
Towards the end of two hours and 45 minutes of nudity, drug abuse, assaults, stabbings, backroom sex, and a visit from a live goat, one of the characters emerges with a baby which she hasn’t even mentioned heretofore. Still, despite its excesses, Halfway Bitches is an entertaining, frightening ride.
