My overall impression
This is one fabulously weird ride.
At first the subject matter (pop culture? swifties?) seems like it could be cutesy and superficial, but NO — this play is very relevant and resonates with me about our culture’s freaky obsession with celebrity, as well as our programmed ideals about love and relationships.
First of all, I LOVE the idea of having seven female playwrights give voices to these seven celebrity ex-boyfriends of Taylor Swift. Women have a lot to say about gender roles and relationships and “perfect” celebrities – and these seven do it well through this darkly humorous and somewhat absurd lens of these “Seven Seductions”. This show is very unlike anything I’ve seen, and I highly recommend it to anyone, regardless of their relationship with theatre and/or Taylor Swift.
Tad Shafer performs no small feat, as he commands the stage alone for the entirety of the play. Shafer occupies all seven of these men (or more often boys) with the strange but right-on mix of honest awkward vulnerability, dark magnetic presence, and the brilliant humor that comes from total commitment.
These seven different plays are melded into one by the intelligent, simple, and intuitive staging of director Amin El Gamal. The sparse set consists mostly of four red blocks and a simple clothes rack, which morph and flow, beautifully creating only what is necessary to tell each story, to bring each moment to life.
Also essential in the flow of this production is the media. As Shafer physically changes from one seducer to the next, there is a projected video that introduces each celebrity ex-boyfriend, lending important context to those of us who may not know who every single one of these dudes actually is. But even these videos are not quite what you’d expect – a strange, trippy mash-up of actual celebrity footage, beautifully crafted by Jonny Taylor.
All seven playwrights brought very different voices to the table, giving the audience a taste of a variety of flavors.
Caitlin Bower’s Joe Jonas and Naida Vazquez’s Taylor Lautner, and Kit Steinkellner’s Conor Kennedy were all different shades of hilariously ridiculous on top of something frighteningly dark.
On the totally opposite end of the spectrum was the grave vulnerability of Lily Blau’s Cory Montieth, and the chilling feeling of seeing the story of someone we know is actually dead.
I particularly enjoyed Joanna Horowitz’s deliciously twisted John Mayor, as well as Joanna Bateman’s Jake Gyllenhal (a silent scene cleverly written entirely in projected text message flirtation, actually giving a “voice” to Swift herself, an interesting and real depiction of a seduction in our super-plugged-in world).
The spot-on finale was Kari Lee’s Harry Styles, who (SPOILERS!) plans to escape the inevitable downfall of the boy-band-celebrity by following the path of JT, and hooking up with a female pop star to launch his solo career. I won’t give you all the details (GO SEE IT!) but Styles somehow end up in Swiftie drag – brilliant!
As this show evolves, I would love to see it trim down and unify (not easy to do with seven different playwrights). Perhaps I’d recommend looking back at each of the stories, and picking one or two prominent themes that Shafer particularly resonates with, and re-focusing each piece through that overall lens.