BWW Reviews: IT ENDS WITH GUINEA PIGS at 1st Stage

1st Stage’s Logan Festival of Solo Performance is back and with it comes the ever-present autobiographical one-person play. In the case of It Ends With Guinea Pigs, directed by Faline England, that one person is writer/performer Diana Gitelman and the autobiographical play is a typical, by-the-numbers excavation of her own childhood trauma, its impact on her struggle to function as a well-adjusted adult and parent, and the emotional catharsis at the feet of the titular pet guinea pigs who she learns to care for and, in doing so, learns to care for herself as well. 

The autobiographical one-person play is, no doubt, a difficult beast. Difficult to perform, in that it requires a great vulnerability and appetite to delve deep into the sewers of one’s own self, not to mention the raw stamina and confidence to hold a stage alone for over an hour, but it can be difficult to experience and talk about as well. In his first autobiographical one-person play Sleepwalk With Me, Mike Birbiglia quipped that “with stand-up comedy, if people don’t like it, they’re basically saying, ‘we don’t like you. You know, your personality.’” But turning one’s self into theater inherently invites the kind of outside scrutiny and critique of a person that would normally be considered violently impolite. 

It Ends With Guinea Pigs tells a fairly straightforward tale within the mold of the autobiographical one-person play. Gitelman is an exhausted mother with a largely absent husband and she struggles to put any time or effort into her own wellbeing. Her elementary school-aged daughter longs for a pet, but Gitelman is too scared by childhood trauma to be willing to grant that wish. That trauma, in classic rule of three format, is set up, reminded, and paid off in a metronomically formulaic manner — not to get into the big reveal, it involves but is not limited to a (late) pet hamster named Frisky. After her daughter is talked down from a dog or a cat to a pair of guinea pigs, Gitelman inevitably ends up being the primary caretaker for the pigs and in taking care of them begins to find a path towards taking care of herself as well. 

There are a few challenges that make It Ends With Guinea Pigs a frustrating watch. Stylistically, it straddles a blurry line in which it ultimately plays like a stand-up set but with some minor, unneeded, and ultimately distracting sound and light design thrown in to give it a sense of theater. Gitelman’s performance also never resolves that conflict; a year into putting on the show at different venues, she is still constantly tripping over her own lines and visibly pausing to remember what comes next so that the show never settles into a comfortable flow. It’s simply too stilted for stand-up, too under-baked for theater. 

Gitelman’s writing is terminally millennial, riddled with sardonic irony, dated references, and unending lists of childish grievances. A significant focus is her inability to recover from her stoic Soviet Jewish upbringing, manifesting in the show as a parade of stereotypical bits about Russian mothers this and babushkas that, all of which is so superficial basically any nationality could be swapped in a like-for-like exchange that would have no impact on the meaning. The core thesis is fatally flawed — Gitelman wasn’t raised uniquely uncomfortable with self-care because of Mother Russia; self-care in itself is explicitly a modern, radical conceit that would have post-dated her parents’ generation whether they were born in Russia, Italy, China, or the moon. 

This kind of narrow, overly self-focused perspective consumes the work. In one bit, Gitelman bemoans her backyard pool, complaining that it’s the type of pool that ought to be filled in and covered in order to grow citrus in its place. The butt of the joke somehow isn’t that Gitelman’s character is so overwhelmingly Southern Californian as to think that filling in a backyard pool to grow citrus is a universally relatable scenario, but rather that her husband is too lazy and neglectful to have done it yet. Los Angeles is just about as far from Northern Virginia as one can get in this country, and a lot of Gitelman’s material just doesn’t seem to translate particularly well. Tysons Corner Center is a far cry from The Grove, just as 1st Stage is a far cry from Largo at the Coronet, and besides the jokes that don’t land, plenty don’t even seem to fully register as jokes. 

When the work isn’t completely unrelatable it veers all the way over to the other extreme. In a particularly central rant, Gitelman goes off on how surprisingly difficult pets guinea pigs are, how they require daily care and premium hay and exotic vets, and again there’s no bit here; the joke really does appear to be how surprisingly difficult pets guinea pigs are. It all becomes weirdly condescending, delivered with this air of unique self-importance. Surely no one in the audience has owned guinea pigs, or ever struggled with mental health, or lost a loved one, and so the details of each tsuris must be pored over at great length for the world to come to grips with the extent of Gitelman’s suffering. 

Of course, it’s all a matter of tone. Observational comedy is the stuff of turning the unrelatable into the relatable, churning the familiar into the unrecognizable. Surely in the hands of a Notaro, a Silverman, a Bamford, there’d be some angle here, some overall lift or lightness to the same material, but in Gitelman’s hands it’s all just grim and dour with no room for catharsis. Ultimately it all goes nowhere — it starts with guinea pigs, ends with guinea pigs, and between all that are one-liners landing to silence, signifying nothing. 

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