Rigid, closed-minded members of the patriarchy might gripe and cover their ears when they watch Lizzie, the Actor’s Express production onstage at Oglethorpe University’s Conant Performing Arts Center through July 24. Screw those jokers! If they want a feel-good musical that doesn’t disturb their vanilla tastes, they can go watch Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Lizzie rocks.
It’s noisy and weird. It’s complicated, brash and uncomfortable. Heck, in the stage announcement, the declaration is made that the show wants to destroy the patriarchy. Sure, some of the notes its music hits aren’t pretty. But neither were the 1890s Massachusetts ax murders likely committed by Lizzie Borden.
Written by Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, Alan Stevens Hewitt and Tim Maner, the show is more like a live concert of a riot grrrl punk rock concept album than a traditional narrative. Nearly all sung-through by four women fronting a five-piece rock band onstage, Lizzie is way more like Pink Floyd’s The Wall or The Who’s Tommy in its structure than Hamilton or Hairspray. There’s little straight dialogue. It’s all rock songs. Some come soft. Most hit hard.
That said, the story of the Borden murders is here, as told by Lizzie (Jasmine Renee Ellis) and three witnesses at her trial: her sister Emma (Jessica De Maria), her neighbor Alice (Megan Zhang) and her maid Bridget (Christina Leidel). The allegation is that Lizzie took an ax and gave her stepmother and father several whacks.
Unlike history, the show firmly establishes that she committed the crimes, but it also provides several compelling reasons why she did it. Lizzie posits that abuse, molestation and incest might have driven Lizzie Borden to off her parents. There are suggestions that she may have been in love with another girl. These are topics that wouldn’t have been discussed in that oppressive era, so Lizzie has no way of escaping or even mentioning the hell she’s in.
This depiction of a woman traumatized and silenced fits well within the show’s rebellious rock framework, where 19th century characters become female rockers and rip off their corsets and scream into the void.
Playing the title character, Ellis — who has shone in leading roles at Shakespeare Tavern Playhouse and True Colors Theatre Company in the last year — delivers another powerhouse performance. Her voice is excellent, stunning from her first solo in the song “This Is Not Love.” During that song, Ellis also embodies the bewildered confusion and painful stumbles of someone who has just been assaulted yet not for the first time.
The role is incredibly difficult. Without much dialogue, it requires Ellis to convey Lizzie’s good heart and genuine appeal to her allies, even as she is driven to spectacularly brutal choices. She shows the character breaking piece by piece, instead of a sudden dive into madness.
Meanwhile, she regularly steps in front of a microphone and becomes a literal rock star.
De Maria’s older sister is more calculated than Lizzie, plotting against her stepmother regarding her future inheritance. The two actresses play their sisterly bond with genuine, unbroken affection. It’s them versus their parents, but things don’t go according to plan. When De Maria and Ellis share an expletive-filled post-murder duet in the second act, it’s one of the highlights of the show.
Zhang’s character is perhaps the script’s most frustrating. She is the most innocent and naïve, even though she has her own secret urges for her neighbor. Her love songs are sweet, slower and filled with earnest yearning. This intentionally clashes with the flavor of the overall show. Because the character is in a romantic daydream and everyone else inhabits a grittier reality, Alice emerges as a default antagonist. Yet Zhang is talented and capable.
Leidel plays Bridget as a conniving character who pushes tensions in the Borden house for her own agenda. Since the character is of a lower class, her anger is often directed at the Borden daughters, as well as their parents. The actress takes on an Irish accent, and her music has a traditional Celtic flavor, even when she is performing rock. Her voice has a richness that blends well when all the characters harmonize.
But these characters’ styles are meant to clash. The music, directed by keyboardist Ashley Prince, is meant to jar. During the opening night performance, some microphone glitches and feedback happened, but that’s not unlike live rock ‘n’ roll. The onstage band features cellist Deisha Oliver, bassist Fuji Fujimoto, drummer Jen Hodges and guitarist B. Walton, who gets several excellent solos throughout the concert.
The staging feels minimalist because the set, designed by Charlie Calvert and decorated with props by Nick Battaglia, is dressed for a rock show instead of a period drama, yet there is a moving staircase, a balcony and tilted doorways that the characters use.
Director Jennifer Alice Acker and choreographer Bubba Carr coordinate a lot of moving parts within Lizzie. Because it feels more like a concert than a play, though, the show has a ramshackle, messy and unpredictable vibe. It feels urgent, defiant and cool.
Even the excellent costumes by Alan Yeong seem like they’re missing pieces. Undergarments and construction elements are uncovered. Jackets are mostly sleeves and leave the characters partially exposed. Thus, they’re modern and period at once. They’re sexy and confining at the same time. And, in the second act, when Lizzie emerges to defiantly face down her accusers, the color of her costume makes as much of a statement as her words.
This show is not for everyone. This show speaks best to the marginalized. Daring audiences looking for something different will feast upon it.
The cult audience that Lizzie deserves is a bunch of costume-wearing, headbanger misfits looking for their next Rocky Horror fix. It deserves purple-haired fangirls who memorize the cast album and sing along. It deserves an audience of boys in black eyeliner and skirts. Trans, nonbinary and genderqueer folks who feel like channeling their frustration at the world for a couple hours should grab a seat here. It is for the furious, the neglected and the ignored. It is for the abuse survivors among us who want to celebrate the sheer, defiant act of remaining alive despite all the damage the world can inflict.
When the world tries to hold you down, keep you quiet or deny your rights to your own body, be like Lizzie. Grab an ax or a microphone, and rage against the machine.
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Benjamin Carr, a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, is an arts journalist and critic who has contributed to ArtsATL since 2019. His plays have been produced at The Vineyard Theatre in Manhattan, as part of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival, and the Center for Puppetry Arts. His novel Impacted was published by The Story Plant in 2021.
