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Whole songs wade through rapidly flowing streams of consciousness, with the writers' lyrics suggesting frenzied, almost drug-infused Googling. ("On a scale of one to ten," one such line runs, "How worried should I be / About all the evil men in the world? About / Climate Change / About chemicals leaching to my food when I / Use a plastic container?") Characters flip into and out of the narrative on seconds' notice, trolling with a humorous remark ("Does it have dairy?", asks a cheerleader contemplating gnawing on some straw. "I'm off dairy. Gives me zits, okay?"), or, in the terrifying 11-o'clock number, 15 minutes of group free association. Heck, a platoon of multiethnic Nancy Drews even invades the stage at one point. The extent to which any of this relates to the evening's ostensible story is open to considerable interpretation. The 14-year-old Becca (a fearless Jill Shackner) is stunned to discover that her mom, Sandy (Karyn Quackenbush), is moving to Ohio—sorry, Iowa—to live with her boyfriend—sorry, fiancé—on a farm. And then... uh... they go? Roughly an hour of our time elapses before they get there, and little tangible happens in the interim. Becca has a conversation with her dad in London and his new wife (Lee Sellars and Cindy Cheung), and debates institutional racism with an African-American Nancy Drew (April Matthis); and her best friend, Amanda (Carolina Sanchez) chats with a cheerleader (a deadpan Annie McNamara), about the perils and pleasures of individuality. Something vaguely resembling a subplot involves buying a burqa from Amazon, a pony sings about his distaste of girlfriends, and Sandy leads a high-stepping nightclub number that's technically about her soon-to-be-exploding emotions ("I've always been the cork / Stuck in the bottle of some awful cheap champagne"), but feels more like an excuse for a few minutes of mindless, tuneful fun.
The cast, too, is personality-packed, with each of the eight performers unavoidably a dynamic original. Quackenbush, on demented autopilot as Sandy, gets most of the laughs; Shackner, the straight-woman nexus, finds most of the heart. With the exception of 9-year-old spitfire Kolette Tetlow, who brightly plays (and underplays) throughout as both a younger Becca and a second girl whose significance we only gradually come to understand, the other actors are crack comedians who extend single psychological ideas to the comedic breaking point—and well beyond. But Schwartz, who's best known for penning the absurdist God's Ear and Somewhere Fun, fails to convince you it's all in the service of some grand higher purpose. She seems to be warning of the dangers of establishing and maintaining intimate relationships in the Internet age; about the only thing everyone has in common is an inability to connect on a level they consider essential, and even more successful attempts usually don't end quite the way they should. (Sandy's betrothal, for example, has four surprise strings attached.) When confronted by a world in which we don't see the people with whom we speak, and in which we're forced to hide who we truly are just to get by, there may be no other recourse than to retreat into our own imaginations and try to construct an existence that works. For most people, that probably won't be found in Iowa the state, but who knows? Unfortunately, through their entropy-embracing lack of clarity that makes a Wikipedia whirlpool look well ordered, Schwartz and Almond have all but ensured the necessary solace is unlikely to be found at Iowa the musical, either.
Iowa
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