Three for One: Monologues for the New Millennium; or Just Get Over It
“Three for One” begins promptly at eight. But just before Thomas-Herrera enters, he announces from backstage that it’s 9:08 PM–he’s even put a clock upstage, its hands frozen at that precise moment, as if to ensure our appreciation of his fashionable tardiness. As we quickly discover, however, his lateness marks him not as a sophisticate but as a parvenu. The conceit is that he’s attending a soiree at Mrs. Dorothea Byford-Shipman’s, where he’s spent a full 19 minutes holed up in her “elegant art deco fantasy bathroom,” paralyzed by the sight of a sparkling bidet, imported Swedish hand creams, and the sound of jeweled sandals padding impatiently outside the door. Swept up into a debilitatingly moneyed cocktail party after a few chance remarks on the sidewalk outside (“Charm can be such a curse,” he laments), he lands with a thud in this tiny room, mortified and seduced.
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The Edwardo who tried to pass himself off as Mrs. Astor in Tango Edwardo and Mondo Edwardo now finds himself face-to-face with real money and realizes, to his relief and shame, that he doesn’t belong in the penthouse. The partygoers who surround him are the kind that Dorothy Parker fondly eviscerated. Amid a cheerless parade of mummified women in lacquered bouffants, a middle-aged doctor plies a chesty blond with free-flowing Tom Collinses. The Polish princess from Nebraska simply must know whether Tiffany’s or Harry Winston sells the better diamonds. The recent divorcee, just emerged from her herb-and-yuba-leaf body wrap, wonders if anyone would like to feel her skin. The Swedish personal trainer, “a Hitler Youth wet dream,” offers a friendly hand and quickly exhausts his five-sentence repertoire.
Cheryl Trykv exploits a similar experience in her new monologue, Terribly Lucky, as her character revisits her family home and tries to find a way back into a once familiar, now absurd world. Like Thomas-Herrera, Trykv has developed a persona that’s all shallowness and insincerity, maintaining a harsh veneer both dissolute and self-congratulatory in her floor-length evening gown and clunky black shoes. In fact she enters to the prerecorded sound of an enthusiastic ovation, waving and smiling to an unseen throng–all the while ready to puke at the cheapness of it all.
Like Thomas-Herrera and Trykv, Connell explores a simple but archetypal moment. He lacks the probing insight of his colleagues, however, producing a rather generic story about youthful infatuation. His writing tends to be abstract and repetitive; he describes the Yale student, for example, as looking like “a romantic sheik or a prince or a king.” And as a performer he seems strangely uncommitted to his material, strolling through it at a leisurely pace. At the very least Connell should have been put first on the bill, not last, so as not to suffer a quick death by comparison.
