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Ive never been good with horror, even in its campier forms.
In sixth grade,Sweeney Toddkept me awake for weeks.
Its arush and its also a pitch-dark examination of the very real chokehold of Christofascist ideology in America.
Later we are told that Mary got herself pregnant by Father God.
From me, too Jacobs and Jacksons book is immediately and consistently funny.
Before its more nightmarish devices emerge, it is, terrifyingly, realism with banging songs.
Both plays are voyages into a particularly American darkness, and they come from places of painful personal knowing.
Well, its also about vagina dentata.
Dawn is headed for a traumatic discovery of what lurks in her lady parts.
While Dawn and Tobey struggle against their raging hormones, Brad descends into the dark web.
Again, is it satire if, with a few clicks, it can all be proved nauseatingly true-to-life?
Crucially, Tobey has proposed, and Dawn loves him.
Now the props designer, Matt Carlin, really gets to start having fun.
There is, however, abutcoming.
The granderTeeths Guignol gets, the more diffuse it feels.
We are oh, word thats never quite as effective as we want it to be implicated.
Thatinside my headis crucial, but its not how Jacobs, Jackson, and Benson play it.
While its tempting to go big and brazen,Teethloses something as it bursts its seams.
But what its got is still, in so many moments, lava-hot and canines-sharp.
Teethis at Playwrights Horizons through April 28.
