Review: 'The Pink Unicorn' leads a mother into unknown territory

A working-class widow, Trisha (Alice Ripley) is content with her life, if missing her husband terribly. She toils as a cleaner at the hospital and entertains herself reading Debbie Macomber novels and watching Rachael Ray on television. Her 14-year-old child, Jolene, is going through pretty standard teenage turmoil that mostly involves wearing black and having a pet tarantula named Beetlejuice. (Elise Forier Edie’s 2013 earnestly light-minded play is named after Jolene’s imaginary friend rather than, say, “The Black Spider,” which says a lot about the overall tone.)

Things are going as well as they can for Trisha, considering, until the day Jolene tells her: “I’m not a girl. Or anyway, I’m not all girl. I’m a boy, too.”

“Nothing in my life had prepared me for gender queer,” a bewildered Trisha says.

The conceit of Amy E. Jones’ staging for Out of the Box Theatrics is that Trisha is speaking at a Diocese of Texas discovery retreat. The 40 or so audience members for the immersive show, which takes place at the theater of the Episcopal Actors’ Guild, can help themselves to cookies and iced tea, but the real treat for fans of Ripley, a Tony Award-winner for the musical “Next to Normal,” is seeing her in such intimate confines.

When Trisha gets Jo’s news, she reacts with perplexity instead of anger or hate; despite a few moments of doubt, her feelings for her child never waver. That baseline of love and protectiveness continues even when things become confrontational.

Jo decides to create a Gay Straight Alliance at her school and wants to pose for her class photo wearing a boys’ blazer. This doesn’t endear her to the authorities, who decide to shut down all the extracurricular clubs rather than authorize the GSA.

Equally unreceptive are Trisha’s church and her own judgmental mother.

But Trisha stands up for her child. She starts finding inconsistencies in biblical interpretations and throws her support behind the students who want the alliance. She even finds herself on the phone with the ACLU, despite the fact that “where I come from, talking to them is pretty close to having a one-on-one with Satan.”

“The Pink Unicorn” is based in part on Edie's personal experience, and she performed it across North America starting in 2013. Yet, oddly, Trisha and — even more so — Jo feel generic. They are described in quick broad strokes that don’t get much deeper than quirky anecdotes and folksy turns of phrase.

The other characters popping in and out make even less of an impression, some of them reduced to names telegraphing personality — Trisha’s minister goes by Pastor Dick, for instance, while the school principal is Cyril Makepeace, even though he most definitely does not.

Of course, it’s impossible not to root for Trisha. But while good intentions go a long way in real life, they are not enough to sustain this undernourished play.

Additional information:

The Pink Unicorn: Through June 2 at the Episcopal Actors’ Guild, Manhattan; ootbtheatrics.com.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.