Review: In Calf Scramble, Teen Angst Meets the Future Farmers of America

The micro-worlds of teenage girls are hot fodder for the stage. Just look at the simmering soccer team in Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves or the amateur members of the occult in Alexis Scheer’s Our Dear Dead Drug Lord. Libby Carr newly adds to the genre at 59E59 Theaters with Calf Scramble, a peek at five Future Farmers of America in smalltown Texas who spend their after-school hours raising calves for auction. For some, it’s a labor of love. For others, it’s an outstretched hand to Jesus. And then there are those praying a cash cow will catapult them somewhere else. Anywhere else.

Odds are slim that the general off-Broadway theatergoing audience has even heard of a calf scramble, let alone banked their future on one. The singularity of this microcosm immediately breeds curiosity, especially when it’s paired with the light nostalgia of a story set in 2007 (costume designer Haydee Zelideth pays subtle homage to the era). And then there’s the front-facing theatricality of Caitlin Sullivan’s direction, which has our five young girls open the play by doubling as one another’s wrangled calves at the title event (set designer Cate McCrea fashions a functional cattle stall onstage). The show is positioned for exciting payoffs, only some of which end up being as satisfying as hoped.

Preacher’s daughter Anna Lee (Ferin Bergen), rancher’s daughter Vivvy (Marvelyn Ramirez), youth group devotee Maren (Maaike Lannstra-Corn), and hometown girl El (Gabriela Veciana) are FFA’s usual suspects. This year’s addition is El’s best friend Sofi (Elisa Tarquinio), a cultural outsider, as cued by her inclination toward academics and aversion to firearms. The only reason she’s YouTubing the ins and outs of cattle raising at all is because she heard about someone’s $600,000 windfall. She and El agree to pool the money from their respective calves so they can go off and start their fabulous adult lives together. The tragedy is they don’t realize how different their visions of the future look.

It’s interesting to observe this friendship junction through the lens of calf raising, which naturally draws in other cultural specifics of being in an insular, conservative, Texas town in the mid-aughts. Those dynamics are particularly salient when Anna Lee and Vivvy’s friendship turns to something more. And yet both partnerships feel more like case studies than lived-in turmoil. It makes you wish for a sense of fluidity and roundness in Carr’s characters, rather than figures who amount to the logical conclusion of a set of personality traits and life circumstances. Of all the girls, Maren has the most dimension, prudishly scolding her ungodly friends one minute and exposing her underlying darkness the next (Lannstra-Corn manages to be both hilarious and terrifying).

But Calf Scramble’s ambitions are more metaphorical than a simple slice-of-life play. As the actors turn from girl to cow and back again moment to moment, you see the lines that Carr and Sullivan have actively drawn between them. Utility, disposability, care, and nurturing. They’re all concepts that audiences are urged to inspect as our characters go about their lives, coaxing their creatures into maturity. However, you can sense the muscle it took to corral all these observations and comparisons. Calf Scramble might be better served by letting its young bullocks roam free.