HOLLYWOOD FRINGE 2013: OUR PREVIEW BY STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS

WHITE HOT

Tommy Smith’s beautifully written White Hot is presented at this year’s Fringe in the play’s West Coast premiere by New York-based company the Vagrancy, also at Theatre Asylum. It, too, is a study in nihilism via two couples: Bri (Christopher Illing), and his seemingly meek, pregnant wife, Lil (Karina Wolfe), plus Lil’s cynical sister, Sis (Michal Sinnott), and a Ukrainian sadist, Grig (Arthur Keng), to whom she’s become sexually enamored.

Sis boasts that neither she, nor the world she lives in, has any room for romantic attachments, that anonymous sex is the key to her kingdom. Her bragging about a recent bout of satisfying anal sex arouses Lil’s curiosity — she asks for the guy’s number.

Her hubby, patronizing Bri, is a living monument to unwitting, condescending pedantry, revealing why so many marriages, based on such blind attempts at controlling another person and some understandably devious responses to it, lead to duplicitous affairs. But this is more than a domestic drama. Mousy Lil’s pregnancy and Sis’ cynicism are allegories for hope and hopelessness at odds with each other.

Ric Zimmerman lights the stage almost entirely from the side with washes of clinical white, where the intensity of the light matches the intensity of the characters’ revelatory frustration. Director Caitlin Hart knows exactly what she’s doing, and why.