\n<\/p>\n
Michael R. Jackson doesn\u2019t have a vagina. He also doesn\u2019t not<\/em> have one.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile I\u2019m not a teen evangelical with teeth in my vagina,\u201d he said, \u201cspiritually I am.\u201d<\/p>\n Jackson\u2019s spectral self-identity was a guiding light as he and the composer Anna K. Jacobs collaborated on \u201cTeeth,\u201d<\/a> a new musical based on Mitchell Lichtenstein\u2019s 2007 indie scary movie<\/a> of the same name. It\u2019s about a high school student named Dawn who discovers to her horror that she has vagina dentata<\/a> \u2014 a myth, found across cultures and eras, about a vagina that has a lethal set of chompers. (The film is streaming on Tubi<\/a>, and the show is in previews Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons before a March 12 opening.)<\/p>\n If you\u2019re going to musicalize a horror movie, \u201cTeeth\u201d is a doozy, and a gamble. Darkly comic and at times stomach-churningly gory, it\u2019s a touchstone of feminist body horror and an exemplar, along with \u201cI Spit on Your Grave\u201d<\/a> and \u201cJennifer\u2019s Body,\u201d<\/a> of a rape-revenge film that indicts misogyny and body shame for the grip they have on women\u2019s sexual autonomy.<\/p>\n Jackson<\/a>, the show\u2019s lyricist, and, with Jacobs, co-writer of the book, said he was drawn to adapt \u201cTeeth\u201d because of how it frames horror and dark comedy around sex and conservative Christianity \u2014 two themes that also raged through his 2022 Broadway musical, \u201cA Strange Loop,\u201d<\/a> a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winner.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI know what it\u2019s like to be afraid of your own body and to feel like somebody\u2019s going to catch you masturbating and what that means, that you\u2019re going to go to hell,\u201d said Jackson, who grew up in the Baptist church. \u201cI immediately glommed onto Dawn because I\u2019ve had that internal experience.\u201d<\/p>\n That last line got a laugh from two other members of the \u201cTeeth\u201d creative team who, with Jackson and Jacobs, sat for an interview at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan before a recent matinee: the director, Sarah Benson<\/a>, and the choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly<\/a>.<\/p>\n Other than Jacobs \u2014 who said she has \u201can exceptionally low fear threshold\u201d \u2014 the musical is the spawn of bona fide horror fans. Jackson said he grew up reading Stephen King novels, which helped him discern that horror is \u201cwhen something you\u2019re afraid of comes true.\u201d<\/p>\n Kelly, who is partial to horror parodies like the \u201cScary Movie\u201d franchise, enjoys watching horror movies alone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt requires you to be vulnerable,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n Benson is something of a Grand Guignol maestro, having directed several macabre shows, like Sarah Kane\u2019s despairing play \u201cBlasted\u201d<\/a> in 2008 at Soho Rep. Benson said her love of horror is rooted in the ways it \u201copens up a space to look at disturbing and destabilizing human behavior inside a container where fear is the material.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n One of her toughest tasks was how to handle the show\u2019s penile amputations. Every assaultive male appendage \u2014 whether attached to Dawn\u2019s crush, her classmate, her doctor \u2014 ends up a bloody stub once it makes her vaginal acquaintance.<\/p>\n Onstage, there is a loud crunch each time Dawn\u2019s penis fly trap takes a bite \u2014 \u201cIt\u2019s <\/em>very percussive,\u201d said Benson \u2014 followed by displays and sprays of blood. Benson said the props team used treated silicone to make the bloodied penises look comical but authentically phallic.<\/p>\n At a recent preview, screams greeted Alyse Alan Louis, who plays Dawn, as she held a male member aloft like Perseus lifting the head of Medusa<\/a>.<\/p>\n Fearful of her vagina, Dawn keeps her secret from her family and from her friends in her conservative church\u2019s no-sex-till-marriage club. Jacobs, whose other musicals include the Andy Warhol-themed \u201cPop!,\u201d<\/a> has been working with Jackson on the show since 2009, when he brought the idea to her. (They both studied musical theater writing at New York University.) Jacobs said a major influence on her score was Christian TikTok, where \u201cteen evangelicalism is sexy\u201d and, as one of her musical numbers proclaims: \u201cModest is hottest.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThat helped me recognize that it\u2019s really important to me that the music feel infectious,\u201d she said, so that audiences \u201cwould almost want to be part of that group.\u201d<\/p>\n In a phone interview, Lichtenstein said he learned about vagina dentata at Bennington College by way of his adviser, Camille Paglia, a renegade cultural scholar<\/a> who taught a class on decadent literature. He took the myth and ran with it in \u201cTeeth,\u201d finding inspiration in the monster with \u201coozing wet teeth\u201d in \u201cAlien\u201d and in the prom-killing powder-keg of religion and repression in \u201cCarrie.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to horror, Lichtenstein \u2014 the son of the Pop Art master Roy Lichtenstein<\/a> and one of the stars of Ang Lee\u2019s 1993 gay rom-com \u201cThe Wedding Banquet\u201d<\/a> \u2014 considers \u201cTeeth\u201d a genre film of another kind.<\/p>\n \u201cThe structure is pretty much the same as most superhero origin movies, where they don\u2019t know they have this power and they reject and deny it, but then they can no longer deny it and they learn how to use it and embrace it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Like many screen-to-stage adaptations, \u201cTeeth\u201d takes dramaturgical liberties. It combines characters (Dawn\u2019s pastor is now also her stepfather, played by Steven Pasquale) and drops some plot points (a nuclear power plant no longer looms in the distance). It introduces an incel story line for Brad (Will Connolly), Dawn\u2019s abused and abusive stepbrother; a conflicted gay character (Jared Loftin); and a Greek chorus-chorus line of do-gooder teenagers called the Promise Keeper Girls.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Also new is the \u201cchaste greeting,\u201d as Jackson described it, in which Dawn and her evangelical peers say hello with gestures involving crossed arms and hand movements. Together they translate, according to Kelly, as \u201cheart, modesty and, like, hey.\u201d A dance vocabulary, in other words, in which shame and desire are competing forces.<\/p>\n \u201cI think about my relationship to religion and I\u2019m like, well if they start dancing, that\u2019s too sexual, it\u2019s not OK,\u201d Kelly said. \u201cIf they\u2019re following the rules, how does the behavior look like dance but follow this rule that they set up for each other that they can\u2019t be close to one another?\u201d<\/p>\n Fans of \u201cTeeth,\u201d the movie, won\u2019t recognize the finale. Lichtenstein built to a dramatic bedroom climax between Brad and Dawn, who embraces her toothy power as a tool for vigilante sexual justice. In the musical, a new ending imagines Dawn and Brad as mythological figures \u2014 gods, really \u2014 storming across a fantastic, scarlet-colored hellscape where pillars of honest-to-God fire illuminate their literal battle of the sexes.<\/p>\n Lichtenstein said the show hits \u201cthe right tone for a young audience and a younger generation.\u201d The creators have his blessing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI\u2019m happy to let them explore it in whatever way they want,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The musical\u2019s sexual libertinism extends beyond the stage. At a small gallery and maker shop inside Playwrights Horizons visitors can learn about and purchase erotic artworks, cheeky educational books (\u201cMy Vag\u201d) and sexual aids (sundry vibrators). There\u2019s a sign-up sheet to receive emails from the Brooklyn sex-positive emporium SHAG<\/a>.<\/p>\n For theatergoers with tender constitutions, \u201cTeeth\u201d may be tough to stomach. To get ahead of complaints, Playwrights Horizons posted on its website a \u201ccontent transparency statement\u201d<\/a> \u2014 a trigger warning \u2014 that cautions audiences about the show\u2019s \u201cintense violence\u201d and \u201cmature content and themes,\u201d including rape and emotional abuse.<\/p>\n Yet at a recent preview, the show\u2019s deliberately cartoonish savagery was met not with walkouts but with raucous cheers from a very Gen Z-looking crowd \u2014 a collective roar of approval, perhaps, that a musical is taking up arms against religious sanctimoniousness and sexual shame in a post-Roe America. The show has already been extended two weeks, through April 14.<\/p>\n \u201cGiven what is going on in the climate right now, people may be bringing in an extra amount of stuff into the theater when they see the show, and perhaps that makes it especially significant to them,\u201d Jacobs said.<\/p>\n Jackson cautioned against measuring anything against the political and cultural moment \u201cbecause once you do that, the moment passes.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, he hoped \u201cTeeth\u201d would be a \u201cpowerful antidote\u201d to the poison of ideological thinking.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want to be told how to live or how to think or what I can say or what I can do,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s why I love our show so much. It\u2019s a container where it\u2019s OK to be a freak.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n