There are two things you should know about “Rapture, Blister, Burn.” It’s about feminism, and it’s fun.
Plays that focus on any kind of -ism tend to provoke a recoil reflex: Who goes to the theater for a lecture?
But Gina Gionfriddo (“Becky Shaw”) has a knack for mixing insightful characterization and snappy dialogue, things she may have picked up while writing for the “Law & Order” franchise.
Here, a college seminar held around a professor’s kitchen table lets three women review their own choices against the history of modern feminism. That 1970s conservative gadfly Phyllis Schlafly pops up now and then, and she’s not even the butt of the jokes — well, not all of them.
Gionfriddo also throws in a comic twist borrowed from Disney’s “Freaky Friday,” by having her heroines trade places.
One of them is Catherine (Amy Brenneman of TV’s “Private Practice” and “Judging Amy”), a high-flying academic who moves home to take care of her ailing mother. She picks up a teaching gig through her grad-school flame Don (Lee Tergesen), now “some sort of disciplinary dean” at the local college.
Don is married to Gwen (Kellie Overbey), another classmate of theirs who dropped out to become a housewife and mother.
Gwen and Catherine remind each other of the road not taken: Catherine craves a family, while Gwen envies Catherine’s independent life.
Framing their perspectives from different generations are Catherine’s droll mom, Alice (Beth Dixon), and a free-spirited young student named Avery (Virginia Kull).
Gionfriddo has called her play an “inadvertent homage” to Wendy Wasserstein’s 1988 hit “The Heidi Chronicles,” but “Rapture, Blister, Burn” cuts with a sharper blade — significantly, the title is lifted from a song by Hole, Courtney Love’s abrasive band (“Take your rapture blister burns/Stand in line, it’s not your turn”).
Fluidly staged by Peter DuBois, the play directs most of its barbs at the hapless 40-something love triangle. The newly sober Gwen is judgmental and bossy, seeming to forget that she’s “a New England WASP. Functional alcoholism is her cultural inheritance.”
Don, her dopey husband, has settled for a life of mediocrity. As Avery, the couple’s former nanny, points out, “the whole Internet porn thing can be really tied up in the whole pot/low ambition thing.” Meanwhile, Catherine wallows in regrets and an idealized idea of family.
But Gionfriddo never mocks them. She and the expert, sympathetic cast make clear that there are no right answers or paths.
“That’s a wonderful toast,” Alice says of Avery’s send-off to Don and Gwen. “Biting yet generous.”
Which is very much like this wonderful show.