The Rage Fairy
Reviewed by Taylor Kass
Ballview Entertainment at the Sherry Theatre
Through March 13
RECOMMENDED
It’s a love story to rival Romeo and Juliet – boy meets girl, girl becomes obsessed with boy even though he kind of sucks, girl rips a hole in the space-time continuum to force him to love her forever. In its world premiere at the Sherry Theater, Antonia Czinger’s The Rage Fairy sings with a bitterly ironic self-awareness as it drags us down the rabbit hole of codependency.
After greeting the audience with a manically cheesy smile, the Rage Fairy (Holly Anne Mitchell) rattles off a litany of diagnoses that provide her with her dark and magical powers: She’s codependent and anxiously attached with “a black hole where a sense of self should be.” She’s an all-powerful being whose untapped energies are solely focused on finding love, a neurotic Tinker Bell who attends Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meetings. Against a soundtrack of girlboss pop anthems, the Rage Fairy relentlessly pursues the object of her desire: a literal Murderer (Isaac Tipton Snyder) who she transforms into a misunderstood and sensitive poet (if only in her mind). Inevitably, her carefully constructed fantasy of him starts to crack when she is visited by the ghosts of the women he has, you know, literally murdered. But instead of running for the hills, The Rage Fairy doubles down on her delusions and bends reality to her will to save him from the consequences of his murdering ways and trap him in a prison of her misplaced affection.
In her Los Angeles debut, playwright-director Czinger has constructed a twisted fairyland of anxiety that serves as an all-too-accurate metaphor for the tortuous experience of being a mentally-ill 20-something-year-old woman struggling to date. But even though The Rage Fairy is deeply personal, it doesn’t sink into the self-indulgent pop psychology peddled by TikTok therapists. Czinger’s bitingly funny dialogue and wonky world-building are endlessly engaging and point to a promising future for this emerging playwright. It’s The Rage Fairy’s world, we’re all just living in it.
Ballview Entertainment at The Sherry Theater, 11052 West Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood; Sat.-Sun, 8:30 p.m.; through March 13 with possible extension through March 20. www.eventbrite.com/e/the-rage-fairy-tickets-246986261557. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes with no intermission.
