Relationships make people crazy, and sometimes, in order to get your sanity back, you have to do something a little crazy yourself. To quote Lena Dunham from her recently released memoir: “Reader, sometimes you see two doors in life, one marked NORMAL BEHAVIOR and one marked PSYCHO STUFF. And after a brief pause to really consider what’s best, you choose psycho stuff.” I Wanttt a Unicorn Frappé!!!, a new play at The Tank, is about going through the door marked PSYCHO STUFF. 

Frappé is a comedy about a very excited young woman engaged to a very disappointing man, trying to plan her wedding while slowly losing her grip on reality. It’s a small production, directed by Alex Tobey, and performed by a cast of five excellent actors who commit completely to the strange world created by playwright Catherine Weingarten. Her characters speak in a language of girly-pop exuberance that often sounds like a text conversation brought to life. The tone is a little like Legally Blonde, but more surreal, satirical, and subversive, as if Elle Woods knew what the word “situationship” meant.

The play works as a sharp send-up of the squealing, cutesy culture that surrounds weddings and modern romance. But beneath all the frosting, Weingarten has smuggled in something more substantial about our individual struggles for self-actualization, and how they come into conflict with true commitment to another person. It’s a comedy. It’s a tragedy. It’s both.

Frappé follows Jenny (Rachel Lin), a sweet girl who’s engaged to a slouchy, flakey guy named Sebastian (Fernando Gonzalez). Jenny has a cute polka-dot top, a high ponytail, and a lot of energy. Sebastian, a handsome, well-built, glib but disconnected guy, is a part-time SAT tutor, lawyer-in-training, and full-time dumbass. When it comes to Sebastian, Jenny is utterly adoring: “When he leaves the room, I can’t breathe,” she says. “His smile is out of a wood-cutting commercial.” But she also appears to register, however faintly, that Sebastian may not be perfect. “What’s going on with you and Sebastian? Do you think he doesn’t love you or something?” asks Jenny’s best friend and maid of honor, Cassandra (a funny and spiky Lindsley Howard). “No, um, he probably does?” replies Jenny. 

There’s another red flag: Sebastian won’t show up for meetings with the wedding planner, Darla (Sabina Friedman-Seitz). Darla is all professional efficiency in a crisp outfit of snappy heels, scarf, skirted suit, and an iron, vein-poppingly autocratic grip on the planning sessions. There’s a great running joke in which she refers to herself in the third person: “Let Darla the wedding planner take care of that!” Darla has spent a lot of time around couples with money to burn on doves; she knows wedding planners  are expected to be both servants and friends: the help, but also your girrrrl, girl! Sabina Friedman-Seitz is a fantastic comic performer, and plays Darla as a highly reactive, judgmental person who’s forced to do all of her reacting behind a face frozen into an excited, twitchy smile. 

When Sebastian finally bothers to show up to the planning sessions, Jenny’s latent insanity creeps out from the edges of her sweet, wholesome personality. Sebastian begins proposing that his wedding have some “rough edges,” suggesting absurd ideas that sound like they were generated by a concussion, like an event where groomsmen leave the venue midway to go look at the monkeys in the zoo. “Very creative ideas!” says Darla.

It’s into this environment of strained excitement and blissful delusion that the titular unicorn frappé makes its appearance. The unicorn frappuccino is a pink-and-blue, highly sugary, syrupy, powdery, iced concoction that Starbucks introduced as a limited-edition beverage in 2017. The drink seems to contain a kind of concentrated ichor of girlhood for Jenny. When Jenny is sipping a frappé, she says she feels all the untapped possibilities in her own life. That includes imagining another man – a dashing prince from a faraway land, also played by Fernando Gonzalez, who does a great job constructing two completely different, but equally douchey, masculine personas. In a sparkly, bedazzled vest, his appearances seem directly tied to Jenny’s frappé consumption, and he embodies the drink’s essential qualities: sugar, sparkle, energy, freedom. (Like Sebastian, he’s also kind of a jerk.) 

Rachel Lin fully embraces Jenny’s zany energy while somehow making the character feel like a real, sympathetic person. Every aspect of Lin’s performance – her physicality, her voice, her breathing, her facial expressions – contributes to a kind of feverish, Lucille Ball-esque comic energy that made me laugh a million times throughout the show. Lin also brings depth to the character. Jenny is nuts, but she does crazy things because she’s going through an emotional struggle, dealing with complicated feelings about what she wants from life, and whether love is ultimately more important to her than freedom. The play isn’t just funny; there’s genuine drama as Jenny starts to melt down. Lin, a gifted dramatic actress, lets the audience witness that emotional process unfold moment by moment, while also riding the rails of the crazy train of Weingarten’s script.

Weingarten is a writer to watch. She has a distinctive comic voice, and, like all great comedy writers, she has a recognizable sensibility – I could identify one of her jokes out of context the same way I could identify something written by Lena Dunham, Ilana Glazer or Jesse Armstrong. Weingarten’s writing reminds me a little of Lena Dunham’s sensibility, whose female characters teeter between insight and delusion. Frappé’s humor is character-based: it takes its characters’ strange minds seriously, and the jokes follow from there. For all its absurdity, Frappé never loses sight of the fact that Jenny's dilemma is a universal one. Is it more important to love than to love the right person? At some point, everyone must decide whether they are in love with a person or with a fantasy, and whether commitment is a form of freedom or a surrender of it. If there’s one show you bring your partner, who you’re on the fence about, to – make it this one.