The Village Bike
Opening Night: June 10, 2014
Closing: July 13, 2014
Theater: Lucille Lortel Theatre
Becky is pregnant—and friskier than ever. But she can’t seem to get the attention of her husband, who is preoccupied with preparing for the baby’s months-away arrival. So Becky takes matters into her own hands and sets out on an adventure that starts with the purchase of a used bike from a man in town and takes her further than she ever expected she’d go.
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June 10, 2014
“She’s like the village bike. Everyone has had a ride.” Though that slang idiom doesn’t appear in the text of British dramatist Penelope Skinner’s 2011 dark comedy The Village Bike, now seeing its New York premiere via MCC Theater, it certainly could describe, for better or for worse, its protagonist. Becky is a thirtysomething woman whose sex drive has skyrocketed ever since she’s gotten pregnant. When her husband refuses to have sex with her, out of fear that he will hurt the baby, Becky must take some extraordinary steps in order to satisfy her needs. In Sam Gold’s production at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, rising indie film star Greta Gerwig plays Becky, a very suitable choice (on paper) if you’re familiar with her work, namely Frances Ha, a coming-of-age flick that she cowrote and also starred in. Yet Gerwig is ill at ease in this daring play that isn’t given the chance to fully express itself within the confines of Gold’s staging, which is focused on the wrong things.
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June 10, 2014
A shiny two-wheeler has a cameo in The Village Bike. But what British playwright Penelope Skinner is really chasing here is the double meaning of the title — it’s slang for the local slut. All aboard! Meet Becky (an excellent Greta Gerwig), married, pregnant and horny as hell. Eco-obsessed husband John (Jason Butler Harner) is no help, despite her pleas. The screwed-up plumbing in their home in small-town England also loudly screeches and clanks. Metaphor isn’t subtle. Still, the premise has promise. The play initially grabs with an unvarnished look at libido that turns typically male and female roles topsy-turvy. While John talks nappies with sad-sack neighbor, Jenny (Cara Seymour), Becky cranks up the porn.
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June 10, 2014
It’s no spoiler to report that the final stage direction of Penelope Skinner’s play The Village Bike, brought over from London by MCC Theater and starring Greta Gerwig, is “Mike wanks.” The whole thing’s about wanking: pleasure and self-pleasure. It starts, hilariously, with a young couple negotiating sex during the first days of the wife’s pregnancy, which has turned Becky ravenous but left John repelled. (He says he’s afraid of killing the baby.) Out comes the collection of porn DVDs, stored in a box marked as wedding crockery; this does not solve the problem. It does, however, get us merrily through the next few scenes, which riff on the ridiculous set-ups and dim double entendres of the genre. To Becky, everything looks like a hookup about to happen. The plumber who arrives to fix the couple’s clanking pipes keeps using the word moist. And the man who sells Becky a bike is named Oliver Hardcastle. Unfortunately, as is often the case with the subject at hand, the play can’t keep this up. Fairly quickly, it is goes through changes that themselves seem to be hormonal. It’s a satire of porn! It’s an English village comedy of manners! It’s actual porn! It’s an indictment of double-standard sexuality! It’s an example of double-standard sexuality! By the end you hate everyone and want to wash your hands.
READ THE REVIEWJune 10, 2014
Greta Gerwig, indie pinup girl for Frances Ha, proves stageworthy playing a sexually needy woman in The Village Bike. In this dark domestic dramedy, which preemed at the Royal Court in 2011, Brit scribe Penelope Skinner tackles some hot topics, from the addictive nature of pornography to female rape fantasies. But there’s no consistency to the scribe’s dramatic voice, which veers from the realistic to the ridiculous in the mouths of characters who don’t talk the same language — and don’t even seem to inhabit the same play. Skinner’s one clever idea was to switch the conventionally clichéd roles of young marrieds expecting their first child. Here, it’s John (Jason Butler Harner), not Becky (Gerwig), who gets the nesting urge. He’s the one who decorates the nursery, assembles crib toys, researches nutritional food sources and hangs on every thump of the dear little fetus’ heartbeat. Playing the part normally assigned to horny husbands, Becky would be happy with less baby talk and more sex.
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June 11, 2014
Greta Gerwig turns out to be the perfect person to ride right over the edge of a cliff with. Now don’t say you haven’t been warned. Because over the cliff is where this surprising actress will have taken you by the end of The Village Bike, the genuinely daring new play by Penelope Skinner that opened on Tuesday night at the Lucille Lortel Theater. In this erotic tale of one really hot summer in provincial England, Ms. Gerwig uses the off-balance, open-faced presence she brought to films like Frances Ha and Greenberg to hook us from the moment we set eyes on her. Her character, Becky, a newly pregnant young wife and schoolteacher, seems so graciously clumsy, so endearingly upfront that we’re willing to follow her anywhere. And then, before you know it, there you are, down in the depths of an addiction that eats up identities. And though you probably aren’t feeling too good about Becky — or about yourself — at this point, you have to admit that it’s been a most illuminating journey into darkness.
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