Strange title. Strange play. Strange experience being trapped in a full-length sitcom that strains credulity and make dismal stabs at profundity.
Ken Weitzman's The As If Body Loop, the fifth play in this year's 31st annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville, is a curdling amalgam of football guy-talk and a Hebrew legend about 36 people called the Lamed Vuv who are chosen at birth by God to carry all the pain of the world.
It seems that social worker Sarah (Kristen Fiorella) is a Lamed Vuv because she has suddenly turned very, very cold and is getting colder by the minute after taking upon herself the woes of her clients. Older brother Aaron (Mark Grapey), a video editor for NFL Films, alarmed by her plunging body temperature and the awkward moments when she robotically bursts into Christmas songs, huddles for consultation with the two others in his dysfunctional family. They are goofy younger brother Glenn (Josh Lefkowitz) and mother Roberta (Jana Robbins), unaffectionately dubbed the Attic Lady (one thinks of the Log Lady in David Lynch's " Twin Peaks") because she retreated to that part of the house (beautifully rendered by scenic designer Paul Owen) to continue her energy healing research after her husband's long-ago disappearance and eventual death. All rather loopy.
Poor Sarah's sudden deep freeze and Aaron's intense stomach pains are attributed to "the as if body loop."
"Seeing someone suffer is very much like suffering yourself," Aaron learns, quoting from a neuroscientist's book. "A nearly identical biological response happens in the body of the witness as happens in the body of the actual sufferer." Gee, it's empathy with a physical component!
One of Sarah's clients, an African-American who was a physics teacher (the amazing Keith Randolph Smith, who steals the show) is the catalyst for resolving all this tosh. Aaron tracks him down and finds the means to thaw out Sarah, who spends most of the play wearing heavy outerwear and covered in blankets as she lies on a couch. Smith's wickedly funny performances almost makes the play bearable. Grapey is also good as Aaron, while Lefkowitz, confiding in his Jesus Beanie Baby, is amusingly vulnerable and cocky as a mamma's boy and wannabe healer.
