Review: Bite Me Is a High School Rom-Com as It Would Really Go Down

If you could get with your high school crush, knowing everything you now know, would you? This implicit question hangs over Eliana Pipes’s Bite Me, which is now making its world premiere in a co-production of Colt Coeur and WP Theater. Unfortunately, the glaringly obvious answer (Hell no) hangs right beside it, resulting in a frustratingly inert afterschool special that only brushes against the truly twisted nature of success and happiness in America.

The set-up will be familiar to anyone who has encountered a rom-com since Shakespeare debuted The Taming of the Shrew: Melody (Malika Samuel) is a studious worrywart. She must be, as she has a lot riding on her precarious presence at her fancy suburban public high school. The only Black girl in class, she doesn’t live in the district. But her parents successfully petitioned for her enrollment, so she travels an hour each way by bus to attend school. (This has not really been the way public schools operate since integrated busing fell apart in the ’90s. Bite Me takes place mostly in 2004.) “The formula is: I come out here to the better school, I get good grades, so that I can make into a good college, and have a good future,” she hyperventilates like a good little meritocrat.

At the edge of 17, the stakes don’t seem nearly as high for Nathan (David Garelik), the school’s part-time drug-dealer. He pays Melody to do his homework as he pursues a hedonistic lifestyle of booze and petty theft. But when he discovers Melody crying into her lunch in the storage closet (his unofficial smoking lounge), these two opposites strike up a friendship that flirts awkwardly with romance as Melody alters her appearance and behavior just to impress him.

Samuel and Garelik get the awkward part down magnificently, making the Nathan-Melody relationship the most believable aspect of Bite Me. Women (and perhaps some gay men) in the audience will cringe in recognition of Melody’s earnest desire to please, to bag the bad boy so she might mount him alongside her numerous other trophies, where all the mean white girls can see. They will also recognize Nathan’s cruel emotional manipulation of our overachiever, as he extends the tiniest shred of affection just so he can yank it away from her. Garelik achieves this with a cigarette dangling from his lips and a hurt puppy-dog gaze in his eyes — obviously trouble.

It’s highly realistic, but too torpid under the mushy direction of Rebecca Martínez, causing Bite Me to feel much longer than its 90 minutes. This is despite solid production design: Chika Shimizu’s set makes the storage closet feel like an oasis within the empathy desert that is this high school, while Sarita Fellows’s costumes illuminate both the period and the characters (Nathan’s cargo pants sport so many pockets for concealing mischief). Lucrecia Briceno’s flashy lighting and Tosin Olufolabi’s pulsating sound design suggest a far more thrilling drama than we actually witness, as Pipes’s script falls into a pattern just as predictable as the teen rom-coms it seems meant to correct.

If this was a John Hughes movie from the ’80s, Nathan would be played by Christian Slater, and he would definitely get together with Melody in the end. But this is an off-Broadway play in 2023, when identity politics and their inherent resentments take center stage. No adolescent trauma is too insignificant for a 90-minute meditation, as we learn when Melody and Nathan reconnect in the storage closet during their 10-year high school reunion (spoilers ahead for those who haven’t already figured it out).

By the time we flash-forward to 2015, it’s hard to muster much sympathy for the 28-year-old biotech executive that Melody has become. What’s meant to be a “yaaas queen” triumph feels like so much needless gloating. Isn’t four years of high-school hell a fair price of admission into the American elite? Hasn’t she won — especially in comparison to Nathan, a line cook newly navigating sobriety? Melody’s travails pale in comparison to those of the six girls who got pregnant at her old high school, whom she mentions with a mixture of dread and disdain. While her infatuation with Nathan certainly leaves her with the lingering sting of adolescent humiliation (a subject to be endlessly rehashed with a well-compensated therapist) it’s nothing compared to a lifetime in the American underclass.

Most disappointingly, Bite Me is a missed opportunity to peel back the curtain on the cruelty of a society in which the choices one makes as a hormone-addled teenager have the potential to make or break a happy adult life — in which even having those choices feels like a luxury when so many people cannot escape the gravitational pull of class as determined by their childhood zip code. In such a merciless system, messy distractions like Nathan are the least of our problems.