Review: ADOLESCENT SALVATION at Rogue Machine

Adolescent Salvation is the world premiere of a new drama at Rogue Machine on Melrose through October 12th.  Adolescent Salvation is the kind of play that is challenging to review because I absolutely hate it, while loving what Rogue Machine does with it.  Rogue Machine is leading the peak renaissance period of LA theatre, an era of rare and exciting greatness on our local stages.  Seeing Rogue Machine with an awful play on their hands only illustrates the brilliance of this theatre.  

Adolescent Salvation has probably the best set I have ever seen, with work of genius level by Joel Daavid, scenic and lighting design, and Megan Trapani, assistant set design, set decoration and props.  It is a magical treasure trove, which you enter through a teen girl’s closet, parting her racks of coats and clothes to enter into an attic bedroom, strung with string lights, painted salmon and rose pink, covered with collages and books, all Gustav Klimt and punk rock.  I wanted to move in immediately.  The use of the set is also spectacularly innovative, with the teen actors flopping onto bean bags and chairs set amongst the audience, immersing the audience in the middle of the story.  The lighting tricks are dazzling.   Direction, by Rogue Machine’s artistic director and resident genius Guillermo Cienfuegos, is sublime.  Guillermo Cienfuegos is supernaturally gifted, one of the greatest directors alive today, and he makes this bad play riveting.  The actors are hindered by the painfully clunky dialogue and banal formulaic characterization of Tim Venable’s writing, but they do beautiful work.

The playwright’s previous brilliant rehab play Baby Foot reminded me of indie 90s cinema in the best and most crave-worthy way.  But Adolescent Salvation feels like a clunky, dated retelling of 90s pop teen ephemera like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Clueless - snarky, shallow, filled with stereotypes and stylized teen “lingo”, and heavy on the ‘tude.  Adolescent Salvation lacks whatever freshness and bubbly appeal the 90s teen pop wave had.  Every character in Adolescent Salvation is a walking cliche: the slutty mean girl, her gay best friend and “emotional support animal”, the drunk cougar mom who cannot get over dad leaving her, the geeky girl with “mature” interests who is being molested by her teacher, and the writing teacher who gave up on his dreams and finds some solace in raping his students.

Some new and repugnant twists do come courtesy of playwright Tim Venable, who congratulates himself on being edgy and controversial with Adolescent Salvation, while coming across as cranky and rancid.  Tim Venable seems to loathe youngsters, and there is very little affection for, or real understanding of, the teen protagonists.  A queer teen gives us an odd, spirited defense of his 70 year old dad’s rejection of his identity (notice the age differential with the dad - this will be a reoccurring theme).   The sad sack predator teacher, a 52 year old man grooming and raping his 16 year old student, is the only truly sympathetic character in the play.  And the only person loudly objecting to this is the evil slutty teen mean girl - with her feminism, “rape culture” and “social justice warrior” beliefs soundly lampooned (not to mention, it is 2025 and here we are, still talking about the “slutty best friend”). Then dark twisty things happen, and Adolescent Salvation becomes a kind of black comedy.

In the end, the 16 year old emerges with a new faith in herself and her writing, thanks to the teacher who kindly took the time to give her faith in herself — along with his geriatric penis.  Meanwhile, in that thing called real life, I have a countless number of friends who have confided in me about the teachers, family friends, relatives, religious leaders, and other trusted parental figures who sexually abused them.  Not one of them shared that this experience gave them more faith in themselves or their art.  What they shared in common was the kind of raw trauma, shame, doubt, and self-loathing that can overwhelm even the most resilient human, the kind of hurt and betrayal that it takes lifetimes to overcome.  

What surprised me about Adolescent Salvation was seeing how well all this misogynistic, dated bullshit went over with the predominantly older audience of the play, who laughed, applauded, and seemed charmed as they teared up to strains of Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville” (the anthem of Adolescent Salvation).  There is clearly a massive generation gap here, a world in which statutory rape, the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandals, Harvey Weinstein, Me Too, and notions of grooming, harassment, and consent are not clouding the sunny horizon.  Another critic explained in his review of Adolescent Salvation that he appreciated that the predator is not villainized, since he, the theatre critic, found himself in his life “in a similar situation.”  Sweet Jesus.

As a woman, I have experienced grown men coming on to me since the age of 9.  There are few things I find more unwelcome than an older male writer explaining to me how cozy, funny or inspiring intergenerational molestation can be.

For anyone who wants a reality check or an actually good piece of art on this subject, I recommend The Big Hurt: A Memoir by Erika Schickel, a truly brilliant book that explores the author untangling the trauma of being raped by her teacher at the prestigious Buxton boarding school in the 1970s — and the lifetime it has taken her to even admit what happened to her.

I enjoy and appreciate controversy and the refusal to kowtow to current intellectual and social trends, and I like what Rogue Machine is trying to do with this play.  But Adolescent Salvation is no Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece about 1950s America, rape, kidnapping, and child abuse. Profoundly disturbing and controversial, Lolita is also shockingly beautiful in its language and rich with complex satire.   Adolescent Salvation suffers from amateurish, painfully bad writing and a playwright who confuses substance with throwing around buzzwords in a blender.  It has very little to say -- except I now know that the Margaritaville chain of restaurants has a very good vegan burger.  Thank you, Adolescent Salvation.

Photos by Jeff Lorch