Women love true-crime stories—so much so that SNL spoofed the fascination a few years ago with a song about women relaxing alone at home watching their favorite “Murder Show.” Fans of the podcast My Favorite Murder (aka “Murderinos”) are overwhelmingly female. When you’re raised from an early age to think that rape and murder are occupational hazards of your gender, maybe morbid laughter and obsessive research are two coping mechanisms—a way of saying to the world, “I’m not afraid, really. They’re just stories.”
Jennifer Rumberger’s The Locusts, now in its world premiere with the Gift Theatre, blends a crime procedural with a family drama to explore generational trauma around violence against women. It has its share of mordant humor, as well as a hopeful insistence on the power of reclaiming one’s own story as a survival mechanism. But it’s also a grim reminder that patriarchy is all about controlling women, instilling terror in their daily lives, and killing them for sport or spite on occasion. Sometimes that happens through “lone wolf” men. Sometimes it’s official state policy. (If you think abortion bans aren’t a form of government-sanctioned serial killing, you haven’t been paying attention.)
The Locusts Through 11/19: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-975-8150, thegifttheatre.org, $38-$45 ($35 seniors, $25 students)
Ella (Cyd Blakewell) is an FBI special agent who’s been sent back to her hometown of Vero Beach, Florida, to help the local cops catch a serial killer. Ella left home as soon as she could, in large part because she somehow survived being kidnapped and raped as a teenager. She remembers very little of the attack, but signs of her PTSD are there if you look for them underneath her let’s-get-down-to-business exterior. That standoffish demeanor initially pisses off Layla (Jennifer Glasse), the police chief, who assumes Ella just looks down on the yokels. But young officer Robbie (Patrick Weber) is fascinated—until his first visit to one of the killer’s crime scenes leaves him reeling.
Ella’s pregnant sister, Maisie (Brittany Burch), whose couch she’s crashing on, remembers to string up some Christmas lights in the living room because Ella is still afraid of the dark. By contrast, Maisie’s daughter, Olive (Mariah Sydnei Gordon), writes tales of girls seeking vengeance against their attackers and dreams of being a writer in New York, much to the delight of her senescent grandmother (Renee Lockett), who ends up having quite a story of her own to tell. But then Olive’s friends start disappearing, and just surviving seems like a formidable enough challenge.
Rumberger has noted that part of the inspiration for her play (deftly directed here by John Gawlik) was reading about the early life of Mary Shelley. The author of Frankenstein never knew her mother, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after giving birth to her, and she faced ostracism for her relationship with Percy Shelley, whose first wife killed herself. She turned that personal trauma into exteriorized monsters, much as Olive does with her fiction in the play. (At one point, Robbie refers to the electric chair as a “reverse Frankenstein”—electricity used to end a “monster,” rather than animate one.)
And while the brutal murders happening in town are foregrounded, it’s clear that Ella and Maisie also have unresolved issues around the suicide of their mother and the death by cancer of their father, as well as the existential dread of living in an ever-redder state. Maisie takes it as a personal affront that MAGA people have moved into their old family home in a town that seems to be dying on the vine. (The mall is gone, for one thing.) The decay feels palpable in Chas Mathieu’s set, hung with tattered swathes of cloth and with cartoonish cutouts of orange trees in the background, and in Trey Brazeal’s sickly shadowy lighting.
So there’s a lot heaped on the dramatic plate here, and not everything feels like it gets the development it deserves. The resentments between Ella and Maisie in particular feel like they’re swept away pretty quickly. (Though in fairness, having a killer stalking the streets probably makes old sibling rivalries feel like small potatoes.) What does stick is the way that each of the sisters has chosen a different way of dealing with their early traumas. Maisie, a nurse, cares for others in a hands-on way, while Ella is more comfortable in an office, analyzing crimes from a distance in order to achieve justice. Blakewell and Burch excel as two women who love each other, but have found it easier (at least in Ella’s case) to express that love from afar.
One thread throughout the play is that our insistence on rewarding girls for being “nice” is a form of grooming them for their own abuse. That guy with the crutches you stop to help with his packages may be setting you up. (Hello, Buffalo Bill!) It’s an interesting observation—being raised with awareness of your vulnerability as a woman, yet also being expected to serve others and put their needs ahead of yours, adds up to an unwinnable dynamic for assessing risk, when even just politely turning down a stranger’s advances on the street can get you battered or killed. (That’s not even taking into account the much higher likelihood of women being beaten or murdered by men who claim to “love” them.)
Rumberger, who has previously written pieces for Chicago’s horror-centered WildClaw Theatre (her Night in Alachua County from 2017 has some narrative similarities to what she’s doing here) doesn’t sugarcoat much. Blakewell’s monologues as Ella, particularly an absolutely searing cri de coeur near the end, sometimes feel as much like the playwright’s own anguished observations as they do the character’s. But Rumberger remains refreshingly unsentimental and steely-eyed in her vision of a world where women have to save themselves and their stories from everyone who reduces them to objects.
At one point, Ella tells Robbie about the women whose murders she’s investigated, and how she mourns for all the things they could have done. Their killers get famous. The women stay dead. So we laugh to scare away the shadows, knowing that the monsters are real. And we wonder if watching one more true-crime documentary will give us the key to survival, or numb us to the point of apathy.