Singles In Agriculture, performed at the Brick, takes place on the last night of a national mixer for unmarried farmers, where Joel (Graeme Gillis) and Priscilla (Abby Rosebrock) have wound up together in Joel’s hotel room and are dancing around the possibility of having sex. Joel is a handsome farm-owner, sexy and shy, of the familiar yes-ma’am aw-shucks type. He’s sexually inhibited by too much religion and senses that he’s outmatched in cultural knowledge, business acumen, and sexual sophistication by Priscilla. Priscilla herself is not a type at all: she is blonde and waifish, somehow both gawky and lascivious, giggly and self-possessed, self-conscious in the moment but confident on the whole, and able to mute her better judgment so she can satisfy her baser needs. She is infused with Rosebrock’s intelligence and wit (Rosebrock is also the playwright; the part fits her so perfectly, it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role).
The character, in fact, is so funny and smart that she throws the balance of the play off, because you don’t quite root for Priscilla and Joel to be a couple. A charming feature of the play is that even as Priscilla tries to seduce Joel, defend herself against his generally sexist confusion about the world, and nurse him through his emotional and financial difficulties, she nevertheless tells Joel what is wrong with him more hilariously and succinctly than any audience member would expect her to. (“Sweetheart, you just have to acknowledge that you were raised in a mouth-breathing farm community that made you socially incompetent,” she admonishes him at one point.) Priscilla knows she’s more sophisticated than Joel, but is physically drawn to him (she describes him as a big man who looks like Cary Grant and is irresistible to women) -- yet this isn’t quite believable, because, while Gillis is a convincing actor who makes Joel’s religious hang-ups sympathetic, he is a little too fine-featured and medium-sized to make the casting work. (Gillis does deserve credit, though, for delivering Joel’s unintentionally humorous existential lamentations with a perfectly straight face, asking Priscilla, “Do you ever just look at your goats in desperation?”)
Priscilla wants something simple from Joel (sex), and Joel wants something complicated (redemption and acceptance of his flaws) from Priscilla. Priscilla has problems - it’s hard to make a profit keeping her pygmy goats, she’s socially isolated, her husband has died, she’s undereducated for how smart she is - but she is confident in herself and doesn’t need to figure out what she wants. But Joel is undeveloped and lost in life; he needs a mother, a lover, a confessor, and a moneylender, and so he demands much more. Unlike Priscilla, he doesn’t know what it is that he asks for.
The play’s drama proceeds along the prescribed arc that this kind of play always has – the couple are locked in a room together and we wait to see whether the various secrets and vulnerabilities revealed will help them affirm each other’s common humanity. I wouldn’t see Singles In Agriculture for its drama alone, but go if you want to see a charming, funny talent with a unique voice. Abby Rosebrock is the real deal.
