In Security

A promising surgeon and nearly newlywed doesn’t so much confront her limitations as spend the night with them at 3LD.

BY ELLEN WERNECKE

Unbound Collective’s newest production In Security, doesn’t just leave the audience feeling vulnerable: Anna Gutto, as Dr. Lona Waverton, performs alone on a set whose details have been painted to resemble the products of line drawings, against a series of videos representing the other people in her life. The act of forced perspective both heightens her role and constrains the audience to see her side of everything, at least for a while, but the tension created by this dimensional conflict is nothing compared to the roles Lona has been juggling in her life until she no longer can, an event which happens to coincide with the night before her wedding.

While her fiancé, shown in a film clip at their kitchen table, tries to keep dinner warm, Lona’s last case becomes an international scramble as she consults with doctors from Barcelona to Tehran. All the while her supervisor (represented by a pair of high-heeled boots projected at head level, like a giant’s), Lona’s professional idol, hovers to make sure she isn’t using the wedding as an excuse to slack off. Leaving out the question of who would bring a wedding dress to a hospital in the first place, the collision of Lona’s personal and professional duties means she can no longer straddle the chasm between her mentor’s mountain of expectations and her husband-to-be’s dream to build a life in South America.

The trouble with Lona is that she’s a spineless people pleaser who has convinced herself that she can please all of them all of the time. And the trouble with In Security is that an audience which has presumably survived that long dark night of the soul and been forced to view life as a balancing act already gets frustrated long before Lona does with her inability to see the lesson approaching. Despite Gutto’s lively physical comedy, the electronic trickery that produces her environment ends up emphasizing how two-dimensional Lona is – a“Cathy” in a lab coat. This digital shrug may be purposefully retrograde in its opinions of professional women (because naturally Lona’s fiancé has no problem reconciling his multiple selves) but it’s a step backwards all the same.


---
Through May 10 at 3LD, 80 Greenwich St.
For tickets and more information, visit UnboundCollective.org.