Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Ah, the loneliness of the one-person show. It’s like the long-distance runner: you need training, stamina, and focus. And of course, excellent running shoes. Much the same is required of the solo performer: you need an idea, a fine script, an astute director, stamina, and focus. But in the end, you run the race alone. “In Security” a one-woman show written and performed by Anna Gutto, directed by Alexis Poledouris at the 3LD Art & Technology Center, Gutto indeed carries the show. She could have used more help.

Lona, played by Gutto, is a surgeon in a prestigious hospital in New York. Her Harvard degree is projected onto the wall in her generic office, as are other set pieces (tellingly, an incessantly ticking clock) as well as minor characters; though she is brilliant at her job, one of the reasons she got it so young-ish was because her female boss (whose projected image inexplicably consists only of her voice, her half-Dominatrix boots, and loud clomping) liked her best, and “persuaded” the board that a woman should be hired. This is bad, because the audience has found out via phone call that Lona, who is also getting married in the morning, is planning a honeymoon, a sabbatical, and a pregnancy. Conflict duly announced.
Lona seems to be handling all of the details of the wedding, which entails making up wedding songs and trying on her wedding dress over her scrubs, fielding phone calls about the seating plan from her mother and father, getting hair tips from her best friend, listening to the scrumptious dinner her wonderful fiancé is preparing for her, and ignoring her able assistant’s pleas to go home (and did I mention also learning Spanish from a smart tape recorder“) And saving people’s lives all at once, apparently.

I can buy that any given woman is multi-tasker and/or a control freak. But not a first-class surgeon, and not like this. She simply wouldn’t have the time, what with all those lives that need saving. She would have hired someone to plan the wedding, the seating chart, field phone calls, etc… because a world-class surgeon would be making a world-class salary, no? In New York, every audience member knows you can hire anyone to do anything, including, by the way, planning a wedding.
Lona, who has been up for 26 hours when the show opens, to no one’s surprise, makes a mistake that sends a patient into a coma. Another surgeon saves the day. Lona is reprimanded by her boss, then has a complete meltdown, calls off her wedding because she has realized her career is more important than her personal life, and is vile to those near and dear to her. It seems that Lona must let go of the fact that she is not “perfect,” but that does not seem to be the problem. The problem is that Lona cannot delegate. Period.

It is not that the problems Gutto has raised that afflict the female persuasion are antiquated; they’re not. They are truly relevant; ask any working mother. It is the suspension of belief that is required of the audience that a brilliant woman would not have considered, before the night she was to be wed, that having children might just interrupt her high-flying career a bit. Might just re-arrange her priorities a bit. Never thought about it? I doubt it. As for the gratuitous nudity… that is all it was. No “In Security” about that, no indeed.