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Review: in 'Athena,' two teenage fencers parry ordinary life

Parry and riposte. Feint and lunge. That’s how you negotiate a fencing match. And if you’re a teenage girl, it’s probably how you negotiate most other stuff, too. In “Athena,” Gracie Gardner’s fierce and lovely comedy at Jack, two high school épée fencers forge a tenuous friendship, advancing and retreating as they train together. They’re practicing for nationals. They’re practicing for life.

Her favorite hobby: sleep. Athena (Julia Greer) is the better fencer and the unhappier person. She lives with her father in a noisy apartment. She goes to concerts, she’s had boyfriends, she’s had sex. “You are advanced,” Mary says.

Is Athena her real name? No, says Athena; she borrows the mythic name for fencing. “I just identify with her story, I guess,” she says. “The goddess of strategic warfare and all that.”

As they train, they talk. Most of the conversation is pretty ordinary. It’s about exercise and Accutane and the weird food they make in the microwave: pizza potato, hot cheese spaghetti. Sometimes it’s more on target, as when the girls compare chest protectors. Mary’s is flat; Athena’s has plastic cups. “The plastic boobs just slow you down,” Mary says. “They just guide someone’s blade right to a hit.” Touché.

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“Athena,” produced by the Hearth, is a much more conventional play than Gardner’s “P____ Sludge,” a surrealist yowl that won the American Playwriting Foundation’s Relentless Award. (The title is relentless, too.) The structure of “Athena” can feel too pat, the culminating bout predictable.

But to director Emma Miller’s credit, that bout is a long, real-time slog up and down the piste, effortful and tough, and a little ugly. (The simple set, with the girls’ foils playing against Jack’s aluminum foil walls is by Emmie Finckel. The costumes, little more than white sneakers and electrified uniforms, are by Dara Affholter.) And the play never diminishes or mocks the importance of a relationship that flourishes and maybe dies over a couple of months during junior year. It treats these girls and their ambitions with the seriousness they deserve.

Awe and Greer play their roles with humor, grit and team spirit — palpable even behind those mesh masks. Awe plays Mary as childlike, but also as the more confident of the pair. Greer’s Athena is more worldly, but also much needier and more fragile. The twining of these characters and performances makes “Athena” hugely appealing and stealthily moving. Then again, I would say that. They’re the ones holding the swords. They’ve been trained to use them.

The play is a work of realism. Parts of it cut so close to lived female experience — the white, urban, middle-class version, anyway — that they hardly feel like fiction at all. But the play made me think about science fiction and the time machine I’d need to send my teenage self to the show. (She read a lot about the Warhol Factory and would have dug the foil walls.)

When I was reading my way through the school library’s theater section, there weren’t many plays by and about young women. There was “A Taste of Honey,” sure, and “Rita, Sue and Bob, Too,” and not a lot more. But in the last several years we’ve seen Sarah DeLappe’s “The Wolves,” Clare Barron’s “I’ll Never Love Again” and Tina Satter’s “In the Pony Palace/Football,” not to mention Ruby Rae Spiegel’s “Dry Land” and Jocelyn Bioh’s “School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play.” Will we add the “Mean Girls” musical to the canon? We’ll see, babe.

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It’s important and a little heartbreaking to see playwrights and producers deciding that stories about the awful, wonderful, completely ordinary business of growing up in a woman’s body are worth telling. I’m so glad to see these plays now. I just wish I could have seen them then.

The New York Times

ALEXIS SOLOSKI © 2018 The New York Times

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