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In the rushing wind of our media-saturated America, we find it increasingly difficult to construct a hierarchy of importance for what we hear, see, and read. Yesterday's martyr becomes today's pitchman, and last year's villains escape into think tanks or become the next attorney general. Yet we continue to struggle for some equilibrium in this feverish present, a minimal pretense that we know "what's happening here." Like butterfly collectors pinning a specimen to poster board, we seek out the unique and vivid, classify it, try to figure its place in the larger system. "This, this right here, this really happened," we say. And as long as we can remember them, not let them pass away in the slipstream, these things can stand still and serve our understanding of the greater context. Sometimes we deceive ourselves in our haste, and sometimes we hit a vein. By choosing the Gary Condit-Chandra Levy scandal as a narrative model, Rob Handel reaches back into the pre-9/11 fog and pulls out a fistful of our neuroses, tabloid obsessions, and contemporary dilemmas. In his play, Aphrodisiac, performed by the 13P theater company under the direction of Ken Rus Schmoll, Handel explores the alienation and failings of contemporary family life, the lonely voyeurism of our media fixations, and the many fractured consequences of political power-lust. As a postage stamp of recent history, Aphrodisiac reminds us that certain issues floating around us, public and private, are neither shallow newspeak, nor soon to disappear. Returning to early 2001, we remember that so much is still unsolved. The play centers on the son and daughter of a Condit-like figure, Congressman Dan Ferris, as they struggle to find their place in a breaking scandal storm centered on their distant father. Avery (Thomas Jay Ryan) and Alma Ferris (Jennifer Dundas) frantically try on the roles of their father, mother, their father's missing mistress, and even their own brother-sister dynamic in an attempt to figure out who they are and what could have happened to the girl on the news. They huddle together and play games like, "I'll be Dad, you be me." The flow of one role into another is often as muddy as the truth they're seeking. At times they are two lovers at dinner, at others a mother begging her son to use his DC connections to call off the police. Body language and pronouns serve as some guide to the audience, but the sense of confusion simulates the swirl of these lives suddenly lived under the glare. Neither of them knows where to turn, and their underdeveloped knowledge of each other and their circumstances allows them to pretend and hypothesize, but never to be certain. Their malnourished relationships with their mother, father, and each other is typical of the American family so many of us know (and may be both a cause and a product of the fixation with media, particularly television). Avery and Alma can't say for sure that their father wouldn't kill someone, much less sleep with someone other than their "bimbo" mother. Avery sees his sister as angry and self-centered, and Alma sees her brother as cold and resigned. Ryan and Dundas do all these things convincingly. Dundas stabs out at the truth, while Ryan collapses onto it like a broken couch. Because of their strength, the constant switching of roles stays grounded in the painful, unspoken sadness of both siblings. Perhaps even more than New York, Washington is the city of media. All the spit and shine of politics in the capitol of this faux-empire make for the ideal "news," whatever form that changeling takes. The sexy, Byzantine world of suited white men and women trading favors in marble hallways or oak-lined cocktail lounges is the perfect canvas for our suspicions and fantasies. They come from us and they represent us, but they're above us, and because of that they must do what we'd like to but can't. Avery understands that, tries to impart it to Alma as the reality-on-the-ground, the lonely landscape that would turn their father -- bland as he is -- into a sexual predator and possible murderer. Handel has a grasp on the city that gives the play a currency and depth, makes it more than an indictment of scandal-mongering, rather of an entire world of clawed back-scratching. Yet, as cable viewers and as an audience, we want to get further inside. ******* In the Act Two, inside is where we go, at the hand of a surprise tour guide. Complete with her self-designed handbag and signature dark lenses, Monica Lewinsky (the fierce, magnetic Alison Weller, who ironically enough reminded me of Hillary Clinton) walks into the Ferris's character-swapping and breaks things down. Instead of wondering exactly who we're listening to, we get it from the horse's mouth, a very infamous mouth. Lewinsky makes things real for Avery and Alma, and for all of us speculators: this is what it was like. This isn't your rationalizations or nightmare, this is what happened to one person who crossed into the world of politics and scandal, not as a spectator but as a participant. Her report is devastating. Do you think, wow, this guy's the most powerful man in the world? "No, dummy, you think, that guy is hot. I want to go to bed with him. It's called falling in love. There are songs about it. I'll make you a tape." But if she left it right there, we'd have our doubts. Just a crush? Just blow jobs? Weller's Lewinsky takes us much farther into the bowels of power, with all the bitter weight of a veteran returned from the front. The whispers at the White House Christmas party, the long ring of the unanswered phone, the betrayal at the ends of rotten friends, these make it personal for us, but that wouldn't really be enough. Instead, Monica's erotica is a political and personal tragicomedy, a bizarre sex that had more to do with how Clinton -- the man and the figure of our time -- felt about power than about his lover. At one point they stand at a one-sided mirror, looking in at the Oval Office and the presidential desk. Monica: "I turned around and slid down his body. He was hard. His hands were in my hair. It was what I wanted to do for him. He thrust his hips and I knew he was seeing that empty chair, that empty office, and what the President did there, how few men know what it's like. I tasted him getting ready to come but he wouldn't let me … I cried into his chest … looked up into his eyes but he wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the empty chair." Are we, as the media-ized America, on our knees with that cock in our mouth or are we watching the chair and refusing to come? Aphrodisiac makes us ask, and that is an accomplishment in a time when we get few chances to ponder our part in this furious mess we call the early 21st century. With all the watching we do, less and less our gaze is turned inward. We wonder what we'd do if we were so-and-so, or what they should have done, or what they really did. In this play, we see yet again how devastating life can be, on-screen or only dreaming in front of it. Throughout the play, and especially at the chilling end, you find yourself wondering what really happened, and trying to remember what you knew about the real-life case when it took up all the headlines, and when you forgot about it. And you feel how fast and loud that wind of events can be, and what gets lost in the rush. "Aphrodisiac
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