There’s a famous movie called “Rear Window.” Now there’s an infamous play that should be titled “Rear Entry.”
Based on Toni Bentley’s “erotic memoir,” the new solo “The Surrender” details its author’s discovery and embrace of anal sex. Rammed with prose as purple as it is explicit, the show, which Bentley adapted herself, is a laughable ego trip. To hear her tell it, you’d think this straight lady had invented butt sex.
The 2004 best seller detailed Bentley’s journey from “wretched emotional submission to my blessed sexual submission.” She and “A-Man,” as she called her main lover, went through the mass-market back door long before Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey even looked at the buzzer.
The show is a monologue, so, sadly, there’s no A-Man here — he might have helped break the monotony.
A former New York City Ballet dancer, Bentley was in her early 40s when her book came out.
Here, the narrator, played by Laura Campbell, looks to be in her mid-20s. It’s a key change: We’re watching a young woman excitedly recount and even brag about her sexual exploits, instead of hearing a mature one reflect on a transformative experience.
It’s hard not to daydream about what a more experienced actress could have done with the material.
But then, not even Judi Dench (now there’s a thought!) could salvage howlers like “I met this man in a foreign land called Bliss,” “The impossible had come to pass in my a - -,” and “He shattered the control panel of my being.”
And when Bentley recalls a man invading her “vertical mail slot,” it’s no metaphor — they literally have sex through an opening usually reserved for the US Postal Service.
As if this all weren’t obvious enough, director Zishan Ugurlu has poor Campbell, clad in a short silk robe and a corset, writhe seductively on a chaise lounge.
The single most interesting aspect of the show is its unintentional portrait of Bentley as an OCD case. She records all her sexual encounters in notebooks (reaching 298 with A-Man alone), grooms obsessively before every session, and keeps her used condoms and crusty K-Y leftovers. (That last bit didn’t make it from the book to the stage.)
But that may have been a bit too disturbing for this rah-rah ode to self-empowerment. Better to end on a coy note — yet even then, the moon only half-rises.