"Kill Your Boyfriends" is a Killer Hit

As the audience members take their seats, they see two lovers seated on opposite ends of the stage clad only in skimpy underwear as they listen to classic oldies and observe the action downstage center as the other four characters take turns relaxing on a tattered old mattress. Clothes are strewn across the stage, a bit of foreshadowing for the many informal costume changes that take place during the performance. When the lights come up on the first scene, two lovers played by Carmen Molina and Christopher Young are nude as they begin the first of many conversations about their lives and their relationship. Soon after, the mattress is filled with two men and two women who are trying desperately to make it through one more night. We soon discover that Molina and Young will be the only actors to speak and that their words are artfully crafted distillations of the works of noted writers such as Alex Dimitrov, Richard Siken, Sylvia Plath, and Sharon Olds.

The play is titled Kill Your Boyfriends and is produced by Pride Films and Plays under the direction of Derek Van Barham. During the course of the play, Molina and Young explore their feelings about life and love and sex as they sift through memories and experiences that are at once passionate, erotic, depressing, and frightening. These moments in time are expertly captured by the remaining four actors—Sarah Goldberg, James Nedrud, Erik Strebig, and Karen Vance—as they convey the panic and the obsession and the desperate sexual longing that ultimately consume all lovers at some point in their relationships. The scenes are incredibly powerful and intense, and all of the actors deliver bold performances that are punctuated at times with full nudity that artfully add to the intensity and the eroticism of the story.

The title of the play is a reference to lines from a poem by the same name written by Alex Dimitrov:

Kill your boyfriends—kill your boyfriends, ladies.

While they kiss you, just before they say

"I'm close," just before they can forget to miss you.

When they mouth sweet things,

when they ask once more to see you.

Why not kill what's yours?

Why not make it lethal?

You are so in love with love.

You are carving out another heart,

you are filling it with nothing see-through.

You must kill your boyfriends.

You must kill what wants,

like death, to keep you.

The dialogue is also filled with many references to the dark and often depressing world view of Sylvia Plath and other evocative poetic passages such as this line from a poem by Sharon Olds titled “Sex Without Love” that captures so well the underlying theme of the play:

How do they do it, the ones who make love


without love? Beautiful as dancers,


gliding over each other like ice-skaters


over the ice, fingers hooked


inside each other's bodies, faces


red as steak, wine, wet as the


children at birth whose mothers are going to


give them away.

Kill Your Boyfriends is a complex and thought-provoking story, and the narration built from the works of many noted writers and poets meshes well with the actions onstage. The performances delivered by the six talented actors are intense, athletic, and passionate, and the combined effect is an extremely compelling tableaux that draws us closer into the lives of these troubled lovers.

With its erotic message and tasteful artistic nudity, Kill Your Boyfriends is a very fitting addition to the Naked July schedule this summer, and it is a show you will not want to miss. The show will be presented each Saturday in July at 8:00 p.m. and each Sunday at 3:00 p.m. There will also be a special midnight performance on July 26th. If you want to see this compelling new show, just click here to order tickets from the secure Brown Paper Tickets web site.