Review: No Reservation Brings Female Perspectives to the Table but Doesn’t Quite Satisfy

“Global goddesses who crash a dinner party celebrating false gods.” Based on that description of No Reservation, now running at La MaMa’s Downstairs Theater, I was hoping to see powerful divine women kicking ass and taking names at the table of male white supremacy—and I got half of what I wanted. No Reservation offers strong performances from its diverse group of actors but doesn’t quite deliver on its premise.

The reckoning gets off to a promising start. We are introduced to the goddesses one by one as they are pulled out of an existential slumber to partake in a dinner party. Despite being intentionally awakened, they aren’t actually invited to sit at the table—place settings indicate the party is for male gods instead. As each appears, the goddesses share their desire to burn the patriarchy and release a wave of feminine, feminist energy into the world to both destroy and renew.

The fearsome energy of those four goddesses carries us through the show’s first half—and the actors are more than up to the task. As the water goddess, Maya Mays embodies the complexity of the ocean through evocative movement and dance. Akiko Aizawa’s fire goddess adds levity, finding moments of humor even as she is ready to burn through anyone who gets in her way. Ninoshka De Leon Gill is genuinely terrifying as the earth goddess, contorting her body as if demonically possessed. And Elizabeth Hess’s air goddess balances light, flighty movements with grounded sorrow.

Though these goddesses are powerful ancient beings from all over the world, the white male patriarchy has reined them in over the course of centuries. Clever costumes by Jane Catherine Shaw suggest the animal nature of each of the goddesses that have been tied down by domesticity: antlers made of cutlery, breasts made of colanders, and feathers made of trash bags.

As the play continues, hints of rifts between the goddesses seemingly set up conflict about how, we assume, they will work together to take down the male gods. The water goddess’s goal of spiritual cleansing is at odds with the fire goddess’s desire to burn everything down. When the goddesses sit at the table despite the lack of invitation, no one reserves a place setting for Hess’s character. She is the oldest as well as the only white woman, both potentially causing tension with her counterparts. None of these characters seems particularly happy to see the others, and it seems like these tensions are part of what they will have to overcome to achieve their goal.

Unfortunately, none of these seeds of conflict take hold in the second half, when the play shifts and the goddesses become more human. Stripping away much of their costumes to go down to all-black outfits, each goddess tells a story about a modern woman of her race. While interesting in theory, the play abandons all the intrigue set up by the first half to tell stories of womanhood that are so broadly sketched that they border on cliché. Nothing pushes the boundaries, transgresses, or reveals something new.

The ending, too, falls short. The women/goddesses achieve a kind of release by telling their stories and communing together, but catharsis doesn’t feel like enough, both for this moment in history and for the play. Completely abandoning the dinner party and the mystical power of the goddesses makes the play spin its wheels at a point when the characters should be having breakthroughs. They don’t have to destroy the world, necessarily, but I wanted to see them do something that fulfilled the promise of the first half.

The fact that the production elements are so strong makes this lack of ending even more disappointing. Hess’s direction creates beautiful moments and allows each actor to show off their physicality and range of emotion. Lighting by Grayson Sepulveda and sound by Lucas Tahiruzzaman Syed enhance the mood.

The beginning of No Reservation made me curious about how the wisdom of ancient goddesses would relate to the problems women face today, but ultimately the ending didn’t leave me with enough to keep me thinking.