A little while back, we told you how excited we were that actress Kiersey Clemons was joining the cast of Eve Ensler‘s Fruit Triology, an Off-Broadway production for the Abingdon Theatre Company. So you know that as soon as the show actually started up performances in NYC, we had to be there to experience it for ourselves.
Starring Kiersey alongside Liz Mikel, the show is composed of three short works: Pomegranate, Avocado, and Coconut. Each of the tales is related through themes of commodification and objectification of women — and exploring the female bodies often forgotten about — but through a mix of raw emotion and dark humor, they take viewers in distinctly different directions. In fact, it’s quite the emotional roller coaster.
In Pomegranate, we quite literally encounter two heads on a shelf, so far dissociated from each other — and their own bodies — that they can barely remember how long they have been waiting there. These women are products for sale, and we ache for them. In Avocado, Kiersey’s monologue, we find a young woman trapped in a terrible confined space as she seeks her freedom. She manages to find some humor in her grotesque situation, and we feel compelled to root for her. The play rounds out with Liz’s monologue, Coconut, which uncovers the deep traumas one woman feels as she spends some time alone with herself massaging lotion into her feet and confronting her insecurities and past aggressions. Any viewer can relate to the dangerous thoughts that sneak in when you let your guard down.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BjnerXUhrhw/?taken-by=kiersey
At times, this work is hard to watch: topics like prostitution, sexual assault, human trafficking, and child abuses aren’t easy to stomach. But it’s important to keep your ears open and eyes peeled as the characters navigate through their own experiences, because you’ll come away from the performance moved.
And as Liz shared in a Broadway World interview, “Theatre is a place to experience thoughts and stories that may not be a part of our daily lives, but lends an understanding to the world in which we live. It’s a way to expand our thinking and push our limits. Fruit Trilogy asks us to expand individually and collectively.”
You can watch the limited engagement of Fruit Trilogy at the Abington Theatre Company’s Lucille Lortel Theatre (121 Christopher Street, New York City) from June 2-23, 2018. Tickets are now on sale via the theater’s website portal.
A note about the show: this play contains nudity, language of sexual assault, and the use of haze stage effects.
