FLOATING RHODA AND THE GLUE MAN, Vitalist Theatre, at the Blue Rider Theatre. According to a huge sign posted in the Blue Rider’s window, Eve Ensler considers this to be the best production of one of her plays she’s seen–proof that she’s as poor a judge of theater as she is a playwright. Her tiresome, overwritten, laughably implausible Floating Rhoda and the Glue Man asks us to care about the tortured sex lives of four cartoonish characters with the emotional maturity of two-year-olds in midtantrum. Hyperanalytical Rhoda begins the play in the midst of an apparent psychotic breakdown and remains certifiable for two solid hours as her girlfriend Terrace, her boyfriend Coyote, and her true love, Barn, blather on in fragmented blank verse about the kind of imagined heterosexual anguish that’s made John Gray a very rich man. The first act’s conclusion exemplifies Ensler’s desperate extremism: Rhoda lands in the hospital after Coyote beats her up, Terrace chooses this moment to profess her love for Rhoda, and Rhoda’s doctor, leaving her critically injured patient unattended, immediately seduces Terrace.
