When I walked into the Hallie Flanagan Studio Theater to an announcement cheerily telling me to “Enjoy Scissoring,” I didn’t quite know what to expect.
The stage was set with two separated areas: to the right was a cozy living room scene with a couch, armchair, coatrack and an artist’s easel in the back, while on the left was an ominous-looking circular stained-glass window above an office desk with a cross hanging on the wall.
The story follows school teacher Abigail Bouer, played by Stevie Ordway ’25, who has just started her new teaching job at a Catholic school, and the events that unravel as she navigates conflict with her girlfriend, confronting her religious guilt and the strange hallucinations she begins seeing as her stress grows. The first scene opened with a dramatic mardi-gras celebration, where Abigail is partying with her girlfriend Josie (Maya Delmont ’25) when her new Catholic school boss, Elaine Dufoe (Kendra Burford ’28) shows up. A conflict occurs when Josie picks up on Abigail’s apprehension at having her Catholic boss meet her artist girlfriend, and Josie storms out.
This scene sets up the main plotline, the internal and external struggles that Abigail undertakes as she begins a new job that pressures her to conceal her sexuality and, as such, her partner. Abigail quickly finds comfort in a friend and coworker, Celia, played by Gabriella Rosenberg ’27, whom she eventually confides in about her secret. But Celia is not the only one helping her through her problems — Abigail also starts seeing hallucinations of former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt (Aria Ramanathan ’25) and her partner, Lorena Hickock (Kimberly Estrada ’25), who seem to want to help guide Abigail towards making the right choices. Eventually, the conflict between Abigail and Josie comes to a head when Josie decides to move out, unable to support her girlfriend in sacrificing a part of her identity for the sake of her job.
When the (spoiler alert!) plot twist kiss between Abigail and Celia happened around two-thirds of the way into the show, the audience gasped in disbelief. I was surprised that so few people seemed to have seen it coming — I, for one, caught on with Celia’s early line, “You can trust me, Abby,” accompanied by a suspiciously intimate touch of their hands. I watched in amusement as two audience members turned to slowly look at each other, eyebrows raised, as Celia pranced off the stage after that line. But when the time came, it still seemed to shock the vast majority of the people around me.
This moment was when the resolution began to unfold, and by this point, the progression of the story has a clear trajectory. Yet although we get to see Abigail finally going after what she really wants, I found it less interesting than the build-up of the rest of the play. To me, it felt more like tying up loose ends of the plotline than the earlier focus of providing the audience with laughable dialogue or intriguing interactions. Similarly, the ending, while there was nothing inherently wrong with it, was underwhelming to me.
This isn’t to say anything negative about the production of the play. My issue lies more with the original writing of the play, not the quality of the production itself. Mainly, although I found the plotline a bit hard to follow at the beginning, the storyline did improve in clarity as it progressed. The set production, timing, sound and costumes were all very well done, and the Theater Department’s cast and crew made it into an enjoyable, humorous production with lots of positive feedback from the Smith community.
One of the things I appreciated most about the story and the actors was that they did a great job of using moments of humor to undercut what would have otherwise been some rather overwhelmingly tense subject matter; namely, religious trauma and internalized homophobia. This created a humorous and entertaining yet also thought-provoking production tackling relevant issues that felt right at home on Smith’s campus. Without such a comical nature, the show would have felt much heavier, and probably would have needed to come with a trigger warning (beyond the already arguably telling title).
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