Bed Trick Written Response by Negasi Brown

Amid growing concerns around consent, safety, and trust in our political climate, “The Bed Trick” by Keiko Green forces the audience to reckon with misinformation by magnifying the relationships between college roommates. This sharply-written show guides the reader through questions of forgiveness, choice, and change while snappily shifting between Shakespearean direct address and contemporary character acting. 

Throughout the play, the characters navigate the emotional turmoil of divorced parents, distant partners and deceptive friends while coming of age on stage. The premise is simple: the bed trick is a morally-dubious prank where the bed tricked is told they will be having sex with one person, but that person is swapped with the bed tricker. While the premise is simple, the relationships are anything but. The actors expertly portray the tension, explorations and revelation necessary in navigating budding friendships and love lost.

Harriet (Angie Tennant) functions as the unreliable narrator, drawing parallels between the modern relationships and Shakespeare’s Classic “All’s Well That Ends Well.” Her character interjects with direct address to both draw dramatic parallels and muse about the genius of Shakespeare’s performance traditions. The direct address was particularly effective when Harriet would comment on the nature of performance itself. She questions the role of both the audience and actor as she expands our understanding of participation in a play. Angie Tennant fearlessly jumps between character and narrator, allowing the audience a glimpse into the mental landscape of the characters on stage.

The play drew upon the allegorical strength of Shakespeare while actively critiquing its source material. As a writer who does not particularly enjoy Shakespeare, I felt very seen by the character of Lulu (Madeline Tran), the “mean girl” of the show. While her no-nonsense attitude comes off as abrasive at first, her questions cut like a knife through the social realities of classical plays. She starts her critique of “All’s Well That Ends Well” with an extremely important question, “is the bed trick rape?”. Once asked, it’s like time froze in the theater. This question especially impacted Marianne (Sami Yacob-Andrus), whose parents met under similar circumstances, setting the play in motion. 

As Marianne sought her father Benny’s (Isaac Lamb) truth, she re-opened wounds from the traumatic start of his relationship to his ex-wife (Claire Rigsby) and the deceitful sex involved. Benny tried to downplay the impact of this experience, neglecting the real harm to his daughters’ understandings of healthy relationships. In doing so, Marianne experiences the trappings of generational trauma. Healing is put on hold to restore a sense of comfort for the characters. Benny inadvertently sets off a chain of events leading to additional trauma, heartache, and suffering that may have been avoided with some challenging conversations. The play finishes with apologies and questions, pushing the audience to wonder how we can undue the harm of sexual assault in our communities.

“The Bed Trick” does a brilliant job of leaving the audience with more questions than answers. Rather than providing a clear answer to what (or who) deserves forgiveness, the actors actively ask the audience for forgiveness, saying “a bow is an apology”. The actors apologize for not providing us with a clear moral conclusion. The ending inspires conversation, leaving us to reconcile our own traumas while still trying to seek safety in our romantic and platonic lives, reminding us that we are never done maturing.