Joshua Harmon’s “Skintight,” on view now at Actor’s Express, is not a typical play. First performed in June of 2018, the play uses vulgar humor and explicit language to showcase the relationship of perhaps the strangest family audience members have ever seen.
“Skintight” opens on a sleek living room in West Village, belonging to fashion mogul Elliot Isaac, played by Chris Kayser. Each detail of the immaculate room is no mistake — “Skintight” scenic designer Seamus Bourne intentionally designed the set to reflect the themes of the show.
“Beauty plays a large part in the show,” Bourne said. “The room is very much one of form, rather than function. No one should feel comfortable here, it’s all for looks — to keep up appearances.”
Elliott’s family — his daughter Jodi (Wendy Melkonian) and his son Benjamin (Jake Berne) — has come together to celebrate his 70th birthday. Also joining the Isaac family is Elliott’s new boyfriend, Trey (Truman Griffin).
While the plot is basic, the inner emotions of each character are explored in depth through simple dialogue, conversations with little impact other than to explore what each person in the play is feeling.
“[Harmon] really understands how to get at very thorny issues by zeroing in on very private moments in his characters’ lives, but in doing so, exploring something a lot bigger and more expansive,” Freddie Ashley, the director of “Skintight”, said. “The play is really interesting in that it goes back and forth from very sharp, biting humor when you can’t believe what a character just said to moments of real warmth and beauty that are moving.”
Ashley has served as artistic director of Actor’s Express for more than 12 years and is responsible for choosing each season’s shows at the theater company.
“The process for choosing this one was pretty simple,” he said. “I knew right away that I wanted to do it at the first opportunity.”
Ashley was attracted to the show immediately after reading it, finding a unique story within the text.
“I just thought that the family dynamics that it uncovered were all a story I had never seen before,” he said.
Beneath the threadbare storyline of the play lies a major theme: beauty. How much do we let it control our lives?
“It’s kind of showing two sides of things,” Wendy Melkonian said. “Joshua Harmon, the playwright, never pounds something into you one way or the other He’s so good about showing both sides of things, and I think he writes pieces which allow the conversation to just get going.”
These themes and conversations are not unfamiliar topics for Atlantans and for Georgia State students.
“I think that those obsessions that we have as Americans with sex and physical beauty and youth are very prevelant in Atlanta,” Ashley said. “The entire culture of America is built on celebrating youth and beauty. We are not a culture that is built on celebrating our elders. I think it has a similar resonance in Atlanta that it would have in any city in America because that is a deeply contemporary American problem.”
The debate over whether this obsession is healthy and natural circulated the small theatre after the show. Some argued in favor of Elliot and his obsession with Botox and younger men. Others, such as audience member Jessica Sager, believed that chasing one’s youth is unnatural.
“The obsession with youth, I think, is a big problem,” Sager said. “I’m in my mid-20s, and I already have friends who are going, ‘Oh, God, I’m old. This is terrible.’ I think that’s really relevant.”
Besides the overarching themes of youth and physical beauty, “Skintight” also explores smaller themes in more subtle ways, including the power of money, since “Skintight” not only involves a gay father with a much younger boyfriend, but also looks at a family that lives above the means of most Americans.
“These are not middle-class characters,” Ashley said. “These are not even everyday rich people. These are people who live in a very rarefied world, in which there is a full staff at home.”
Two of the six characters featured in the show are actually staff for the home, Jeff (Christopher Repotski) and Orsolya (Marianne Fraulo). The family sometimes treats these characters with kindness and sometimes with disdain.
Trey demands Diet Coke and yells when a coaster is not used in the placement of the beverage. Elliot apologizes profusely for his partner’s behavior. While both come from a lower socioeconomic status, Elliot has worked his way into wealth, whereas Trey has obtained it vicariously via his relationship with Elliot. Both their age and experience has made them differ in perspective.
Similarly, audience members of different ages and experiences will have different perspectives on the play itself.
“I would love to sit down and watch this play with some people in their 70s, some people in their 40s and some people in their 20s and see what the different reactions are,” Ashley said. “I would be willing to bet money that the reactions would be a little bit different and that there would be different kinds of allegiances to different characters based to some extent on the age of the audience member.”
While the family is layered with dysfunction and exasperation, underneath there is so much love among these wildly different characters.
“I think Jodi’s thesis is in that first scene, and that is when she says, ‘All I want is one weekend where there aren’t little interlopers running around. All I need is a weekend with people who mean something to each other, who love each other,” Melkonian said. “That’s her intention for the show. But she doesn’t realize that she does end up with it. She just doesn’t like who it is that loves each other at the end.”
While in the final moments of the play, we don’t see an intense relationship between Trey and Elliot’s family, there is a strong possibility for this in the future of the world of the play.
“I think [Jodi] could [love Trey],” Melkonian said. “I think I as the actor have been clocking, ‘He cares about my dad. He takes care of my dad. Having someone here to take care of him will be really lovely and to know that he’s doing that without being asked, without being told.’ That gives it a little hope that she will love him one day.”
Actor’s Express has taken a play featuring issues not often discussed in modern communities and brought it to life with startling relevance. Audiences in the room were shocked into gasps and laughter throughout the show.
“It’s one of those plays that has a little bit of everything: it’s funny, it’s sexy, it’s thought-provoking,” Ashley said. “Who could ask for anything more?”
“Skintight” is playing at Actor’s Express now through Oct. 13.
