Bi Bi Love
The two greatest curses of contemporary theater are the Secret Drama and the Sitcom Play. Some very accomplished playwrights with urgent stories to tell, like Sam Shepard and Neil Simon, have made these genres work, and now students practice them in playwriting classes and workshops. They’ve become theater’s main formulas. And heaven help us, now the genres are blurring together to create a new form–the Secret Sitcom Play. It combines the Secret Drama’s predictable hidden story, which disrupts the carefully constructed community-in-dramatic-denial, with the jovial rompings of the Sitcom Play, in which a perkily dysfunctional community has all the reality of the domestic comedies aired nightly on TV. Karl J.B. Sundstrom’s Bi Bi Love is one of these confusing hybrids, trying to confront social issues at the same time it aims for the audience’s funny bone.
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Sarah is a bisexual forced to choose between her live-in boyfriend, James, and her ex-lover Veronica’s passionate ghost, who has materialized in seductive tangibility. Friends, neighbors, and family members cluster around this lover’s triangle, symbolizing the many different cultural and sexual choices of the 90s. They all want Sarah to tell her clueless but benign boyfriend about her past relationship, not realizing that she has another deeper (but not much deeper) secret. Until Veronica’s ghost begins to terrorize James and faces exorcism by a drunken priest, Sarah refuses to confront her inmost truth–that she needs to be alone with herself before she can make any partnership work.
The priest, the psychic, and the brother are all presented as wacky cultural outcasts who disturb the yuppie balance of the closed circle of friends in Sarah’s living room. Sundstrom doesn’t expect us to be tolerant of their eccentricities–they are simply strange. Any cultural pressures, whether radical or conservative, not embodied in this circle are delegitimized; the characters outside the circle are scarecrows, which allows us to avoid thinking in depth about the problems faced by tolerant people in an intolerant society. Nor are we ever encouraged to examine the reasons for the prejudices that disturb us. And this casual manipulation of conservative burlesques hobbles both the comedy and the drama.
