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Catherine Weingarten’s sugary, buzzily entertaining fable about wedding planning gone awry sends up what it sees as hollow Gen-Z values with a confused mishmash of symbolism and fantasy. Engaging if ultimately bloated and somewhat maddening, the terribly titled I Wanttt a Unicorn Frappe!!! follows the preparations for a wedding between over-the-moon Jenny (a comedy-powerhouse turn by Rachel Lin) and Sebastian (Fernando Gonzalez), a shiftless, barely-interested charmer who seems to have proposed as a lark.
Sebastian’s failure to show up for a meeting with wedding planner Darla (Sabina Friedman-Seitz) clues us in quickly that Jenny’s head-over-heels devotion and giddy dreams of a perfect wedding aren’t likely to turn out well. Jenny blithely ignores doubts from her BFF Cassandra (Lindsley Howard), while her mother’s (Meg MacCary) passive-aggressive observations about her own experiences with marriage go right over her head. It seems nothing can pull the wool from our hapless bride-to-be’s eyes.
Much of the crisply staged action takes place in a Starbucks that for four days only is serving a special, particolored frappe made with “real unicorn.” It’s too sweet for anyone else to stomach, but Jenny sucks down so many of the monstrous confections that they project her into a fantasy world where a glamorous, hilariously costumed Prince who looks eerily like Sebastian (and is played by Gonzalez) professes his undying love, the perfect inverse of the real Sebastian’s disinterest and dishonesty.
While her friends and family remain in something akin to the real world, Jenny falls deeper and deeper into frappe-fantasy-land, which, ironically, eventually opens her eyes to the hollowness of her vision of a romantic future with her louche fiancé.
On stage for almost the entirety of all of the many short scenes, Lin is an untiring fount of comic energy and wide-eyed naïveté, and later woe and anger. Friedman-Seitz’s Darla is a believable mix of businesslike seriousness and empathetic support. Howard’s brilliant turn as the artsy yet level-headed Cassandra gives us that great spectacle of the theater, a caricature who elicits our sympathy in gushes. Her account of an ignored performance-art piece is a like a knife in the side.
MacCary as Jenny’s mother gives a masterclass in comic tone and timing. Gonzalez exudes cocky charm as Sebastian and a different, soft-fantasy kind of charisma as the Prince.
Director Alex Tobey and scenic designer Benny Pitt make excellent use of The Tank’s tiny off-off-Broadway space to put us in a coffeehouse, a bedroom, a cake-tasting room, and a sparkly fantasy-land limned with pink and purple light and absurdly oversized props.
With all its great performances and production, I Wanttt a Unicorn Frappe!!! left me with mixed feelings. The story stretched on too long, leaving me anxious for action at times. The ending leaves some questions open, not least the unresolved blurring of fantasy and reality. And if there is a moral, other than a sour view of marriage itself, I couldn’t discern it, which seems weird in a play so pointedly focused on a delusional romantic fantasy. All in all, though, I give this world premiere a thumbs-up. It’s at The Tank on West 36 St. through June 21. Get tickets online.
