Inanimate

Erica, shy and more than a little socially awkward, is in love with Dee

The problem is that her politician sister, her only and equally awkward new friend, and the nosy residents of their small town in Massachusetts don’t understand at all, because Dee … well, Dee is a Dairy Queen sign

Inanimate is a play that explores objectum sexuality (sexual feelings towards inanimate objects), feeling like an outsider, listening to your heart

And finally, finding your tribe ...

REVIEWS

"Chances are that you have had a friend who fell in love with someone you felt was, to put it kindly, unsuitable

Yet the more you listened to your friend talk, the more you saw this object of adoration through her eyes

And maybe you came not only to understand the attraction but even almost to share it

Such is the experience of listening to Erica, the enraptured heroine of Nick Robideau’s Inanimate, a sly and very likable comedy … the 30-year-old Erica has for the first time found true romance, and yes, yes, oh yes, she never knew it could be like this

She’d shout it from the rooftops if she could

But she fears society is not ready to accept this relationship.

Erica, you see, is in love with a wonderful - wait for it - fast-food restaurant sign

A Dairy Queen sign, to be specific

Erica fondly calls it Dee, after the first letter of its illuminated name

The category of loves that dare not speak their names, at least from American theater stages, keeps shrinking

In 2002, Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? presented a married architect’s affair with a barnyard animal as a means of exploring the limits of erotic tolerance

Inanimate takes this investigation a step further, with a fractured lyricism all its own

The brave new world, or perhaps not so new, just previously unmentionable is clinically known as ‘objectum sexuality,’ or objectophilia

Clinical, though, is definitely not the word for Inanimate … this play unfolds as a sort of normcore comic variation on Romeo and Juliet, which insists we regard its central relationship as worthy of high flights of poetic fancy

Inanimate wins us over by contextualizing its exotic subject in the bedrock of the familiar

Subjectively, most of us went through what Erica is experiencing when we were teenagers, terrified by the insistent promptings of our libidos

And as the play progresses, and Erica confesses her once secret love, Nick Robideau drolly insinuates that all tales of coming to terms with sexuality are ‘coming out’ stories"~ Ben Brantley, The New York Times