Review: Building a Better Girl in ‘Honestly Sincere’

The gay liberation movement has defined the closet as a smothering, imprisoning space. But it can also be, during moments of transition and danger, a sheltering and even a freeing one.

Or so we’ve learned this past year from Theater in Quarantine, the shoestring East Village company that since April 2020 has been producing marvelous live work from the 4-foot-by-8-foot box in which Joshua William Gelb used to store his winter coats. In dozens of plays, performance pieces and dance theater amalgams, Gelb and his collaborators have been repurposing spatial and safety restrictions to build a valuable new outpost of the avant-garde.

As it happens, refuge and transformation are the animating ideas behind the company’s latest offering: “Honestly Sincere,” a charming, edgy new play by Liza Birkenmeier that not only streams from a closet but is also set in one. There among her pink and gray tops, 13-year-old Greta Hemberger makes a series of calls on her mother’s cellphone that in their intimacy and awkwardness seem to encompass the whole of early teenage girlhood in one breathless caress.

It’s only natural that Greta retreats to her closet; on the cusp of so many kinds of self-discovery, she is also something of a self-embarrassment. She has not, for instance, gotten the role she sought in her school’s production of “Bye Bye Birdie” — the role of Albert, that is, the male lead. But in her private Sweet Apple, she can appear to herself (and to us) as if she had: Played by Gelb, in a gray suit and striped tie, she even tap dances to “Put On a Happy Face.”

And when she calls a friend known only as F (Remi Elberg), she can rehearse real-life personalities too. F won’t mock her for saying pretentious, possibly meaningless things like “I am no longer a bodied animal I am only an effect.” She’ll merely continue the conversation as if nothing more than a burp had interrupted it.

This is all very strange and adorable, but Birkenmeier, whose terrific full-length play “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House” displayed a similar crafty delicacy, isn’t about to waste time even in a 30-minute sketch. Nor is Greta; she soon gets to the point with F, which is to obtain the phone number of Ethan Blum, a boy she hopes to invite to a dance even though he has a quasi-girlfriend and is probably gay.

If her conversation with the adenoidal Ethan (Alexander Bello) weren’t so sweet and hilarious, you would probably be annoyed on his behalf when you realize that Greta is really calling to talk to his older sister Sabel (Hailey Lynn Elberg) on the flimsiest of excuses. She now tries on yet a new personality, a sophisticate prone to gibberish like “diligence is deeply tragic and maybe even unjust,” while still thrilling to the possibility of having a 17-year-old help with her makeup if not with her math.

This is all so beautifully acted under the direction of Gelb and Katie Rose McLaughlin that I forgot that the characters, except for Greta, are disembodied voices on the other end of her phone. And even Greta, in a way, is disembodied, piped as she is through Gelb’s rather fearless 36-year-old cisgender maleness.

Whether Greta is cisgender or gay or something else is unclear — probably to her, as well; she’s 13. But in “Honestly Sincere” (the title is taken from another “Bye Bye Birdie” song), Birkenmeier is less interested in pinning down identity than in tracing the lovely way a girl in the comfort of her chosen safe space (and with the help of her chosen technology and friends) sets out to discover it.

Which brings us back to Theater in Quarantine and its own chosen space, technology and friends. I’ve not usually been a fan of the avant-garde, which too often strikes me as intellectualized and chilly, fogged in a machismo musk. But these closet productions, fully odd though they may be, are nearly always warmer, more penetrating and more speculative in exploring gender than the works of the old-school male gurus.

It matters that so many of them — including Heather Christian’s “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face” and Madeleine George’s lovely “Mute Swan” — are written by women. Their characters, even when embodied by a man, seem safe enough in the cozy closet to represent and thus honor more than just themselves.

Honestly Sincere
On the Theater in Quarantine YouTube page