The first thing Eve Ensler said to her audience after the curtain (finally) fell on "Fruit Trilogy" ("Pomegranate."  "Avocado."  "Coconut"), after she sat on crossed legs in a super-fashionable white satin Indian long-crotch bodywrap, was "we are living in a terrible, terrible time."  To myself: Groan.

Her 99% female audience, with a scattering of (homoerotic?) males, ate her up. 

The playlets, lasting 80 minutes, no intermission, were a trio of pieces I conceive of as women caged.  The first, in an inky black stage with two windows revealing two lit heads inside, was at least an evocation of Beckett, for those fond of his exceptional and groundbreaking theatrical pieces – two disembodied heads speaking toward the audience but not addressing us, lit by neon lights.  As they jabber about stores and shelves and the beginning of spring, we glimmer that they are actually closely entrapped heads for sale.  A pomegranate apparently grows in the eyeshot of one of the heads, and she threnodizes on the loveliness, and hope, of the blossoming fruit. 

Over too soon, replaced by a dimly lit corner of the stage, where a woman clearly caged or encased rails fitfully and occasionally grotesquely about her condition, evidently en route to sex slavery or prostitution.  Or worse.  She mentions fish often, so we had hoped she would emerge from the gloaming as a mermaid, but no dice.  Hard to take, given the dimness of the lighting that matches the dimness of the Lucille Lortel theater in which these cultivars are staged.

We are introduced to annoyance before the playlets even begin as we are handed a postcard instead of a playbill and instructed to get our own real program through cell-phone scanning of the QR digital block on the card.  (Or via website at abingdontheatre,org/ft-program).  Homework.  Thanking us for going green: simply use any QR code reader app.  Swell.

This saves trees, we are told.  Yes, it does.  But if you read the playbill, then print it to see it in hard copy, you are utilizing – oof! – dead trees, too.  And the inconvenience of trying to read the digital block before you can find out about the play or plays you are about to see? 

The snarky ushers had the answers to theatergoers dissatisfied with the infoless postcards: "It's the modern world.  Catch up.  Everyone is going to be doing this." 

We go to the theater pretty much several times a month.  No one yet aside from these grunge-purveyors has offered a clue-challenged card instead of the lovely and information-rich playbills. 

The last "act," the third of the three unsatisfying playlets, is "Coconut," and comprises a large black actress who appeared only facially in the first offering.  She strokes herself with coconut oil amid billows of steam emerging from vents.  Feet.  Feet.  Arms.  Arms.  "Whew," she opines.  "Getting so hot..." and she removes an article or two of clothing.  As you can figure, she soon tires of half-measures.  She soon gets down to her lilac skivvies and forest-green brassiere, which is soon gone.  There she is, her huge globular breasts visible and swinging, soon joining her as she sways and lurches across the stage, inviting the females in the audience to join her.  Most, hm, do.  They are listening as she invokes the power of screw-you nudity and the mystical terrificness of the body.  Distracting, ungainly.  Not prepared for. 

Best word?  Cringe-worthy. 

When the mess is blessedly over, there is a "Talk Back," wherein the playwright, Eve E., and her best friend (her words) from some "radical woman's foundation" share the stage and tell us how empowering the power of body is, blah, blah.  And goes on and on, finally answering a few groveling "questions" and inviting more.  I sit on my hands, as I had through the three playlets.  I don't reverb to her telling us at length how terrible the president is, how awful our country is, how mean and abusive "most men" are.  She exempts a few, including the director at the back, and a few known entities sitting back there, too.

Oh, and she asks us to mass up and scream and go Godiva-bare on the 28th in NYC and the 30th in D.C.  Sure.  Anyone ever mention to this of-the-moment radical that for millennia, women walking naked in public represents shame, great sin, stoning-worthiness?  Not glory. 

Even free, a gift from a colleague, the cost was too high.

Directed by Mark Rosenblatt.
Starring Kiersey Clemons, Liz Mikel.