At Playwright’s Horizons, Halley Feiffer, author and actor is making it with a serial adulterer, with Hamish Linklater in the role, in her comedy “The Pain of My Belligerence.” A master at creating young women who laugh at themselves, Feiffer explains in her program note, her plays skim the neurons of her life, and they are funny until they speak sad truths. In this case her character Cat falls for Guy, who seduces by taking nips at her exposed shoulder on their first date, and in classic wrong guy mode, makes promises that he will not keep. The narcissistic fatuous Guy is especially good at being this “monster” man. Director Trip Cullman keeps their love story zipping along. We, her audience, are privy to Guy’s double talk, of course; he’s seducing us too. (Caution: there’s partial nudity too, and the players are very attractive.) But Cat suffering undiagnosed Lyme’s Disease, reflects Feiffer’s obsession with illness as metaphor, to borrow from Susan Sontag. What can be more physical than the deterioration of one’s body?

As she illustrated in her 2016 play, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City,” mixing the terrors and pain of illness with humor is part of Halley Feiffer’s DNA. Her mother, Jenny Allen, had cancer and performed a one-woman show, “I Got Sick and Then I Got Better.” “I had the idea for the play when I was in the hospital with her,” Feiffer has said: “I had the fantasy that I could have an affair with the son of her hospital roommate.” Apparently sickness and sex are integrally linked. Apparently too, Feiffer is not averse to sharing her coital fantasies with us, very brave indeed.

Painfully set against a deteriorating political backdrop—presidential election to election to future election– the play’s clever conceit never fully makes the connection to our patriarchy, more succinctly and skillfully addressed in Halley Feiffer’s program notes. “The Pain of My Belligerence” is most resonant in the funny truths about marriage, betrayal and rescue as the play wraps up with Guy’s wife (Vanessa Kai) and daughter (Keira Belle Young), and the redemptive forces of the feminine.

Regina Weinreich

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