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No More Candy, the third play written by Mikki Gillette and directed by Asae Dean, opened at 21ten Theatre on Friday, Oct. 11, which happens to be National Coming Out Day. Billed as a queer, feminist, punk rock love story that takes its title from a Bikini Kill song, No More Candy is really an ode to gaybies—LGBTQ+ people who have just come out and/or transitioned, regardless of age. Gillette’s knack for writing relatable, realistic and complex queer and trans characters is on full display. After seeing a comparatively unimaginative nonbinary side story in a major Broadway musical over the summer, Gillette’s writing reads even fresher and more necessary.
Desiree (Ethan Feider) and Belinda (Jody Read) meet in a women’s studies course during freshman year of college and connect at a shitty house party. Like many gaybies, Desiree and Belinda immediately trauma bond (rape, incest and transphobia are some of the show’s heaviest themes) and fall hard for one another. Something about Feider and Read’s onstage chemistry is so embarrassingly earnest that audiences won’t be able to stop themselves from rooting for these crazy kids.
But if they want a happy ending, Desiree and Belinda have to fight for it. As they confront the people who hurt them with boiling rage, climaxing with a messy and dramatic campus protest against a transphobic feminist speaker, the young women realize they won’t settle for less, including from one another. Feider and Read lash out loud enough to make ears ring, but their full-volume fury is familiar to anyone looking back honestly on their personal growth, and will hopefully inspire kindness toward our own inner college kid still figuring things out. Like Desiree’s goth-lite fashions and the play’s soundtrack, No More Candy has the look of the ‘90s down pat. It’s only rooted in the 2010s through a protest against the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, but the play’s fully realized still-developing characters are timeless.
SEE IT: No More Candy at 21ten Theatre, 2110 SE 10th Ave., saltandsagepdx.com. 7:30 pm Thursday–Saturday, 2 pm Sunday, Oct. 17–27. $25 suggested donation.