The Brooklyn Rail

“All ant workers are female and sterile,” Andy Serkis narrated for BBC’s Natural World.

In that series’ 2011 episode, “Empire of the Desert Ants,” Serkis said these insects’ “sole purpose in life is to serve the queens … some stay underground, tending to the queens and to the remaining brood; others head for the surface for a first look at their strange new world.”

The women of A(U)NTS!, too, are workers, childless, and unsure of the dizzying, dazzling land just beyond their own.

“The city?” one character, petrified, asks another after hearing where she went on a first date.

Manhattan is a lot busier than the outer boroughs, where A(U)NTS!’s three women live, and Dr. Lipman’s dental office, where they all work, but mostly snack, in Zoë Geltman’s new comedy. The Big Apple is dynamic, ever-shifting—but, with lifeless fluorescents, Dr. Lipman’s creates a stagnant oasis that doesn’t demand much from the women. The days all blur, so pass the Twizzlers, please.

Annie, Renee, and Sherylann are dental assistants, receptionists, and, most importantly, aunts. Together, they represent a female species depicted over and over in comedic films (My Big Fat Greek Wedding’s Aunt Voula), musicals (Oklahoma!’s Aunt Eller), and TV shows (Rugrats’ Aunt Miriam), all roles that have gifted Andrea Martin a pretty good living. While vibrant, the canonical aunt is pushed to kooky B-plot, but in Geltman’s play, the side characters are the stars. What happens then?

Insistent that aunt-ing, compared to parenting, or anything-ing, does not connote an inferior, more static existence, A(U)NTS! imagines how single, childless aunts grow—and morph—to transcend a role that has been, at times misogynistically, sidelined as assistive to and jealous of the sexual and reproductive.

Addressing that issue, Geltman never abandons humor. These are aunts, after all.

The aunts keep their niblings entertained by turning on Paw Patrol (“so pro-police,” Sherylann says), bemoan the decision to even have kids (“emotional vampires,” per Annie), and go on dates with insipid men (where one told Renee, “I like TV, music, sports, and family”). When they have time to themselves, there are Netflix docs to watch—most recently that one about “murdered women.” The cusp-of-forty aunts kvetch, monologue, and chirp at the dental office—are anyone’s teeth actually getting cleaned? Who cares: we never meet the doctor, and the aunts never finish a story; someone always has another demoralizing tale that one-ups.

The women are a bit lonely, but that doesn’t mean they’re asking for someone to fill a void. Still, their phones keep ringing: while waiting for a guy at a bar, Annie’s mom calls her to say she will be sitting at the kids’ table at an upcoming wedding. Worse, Annie predicts her nieces and nephews will play Never Have I Ever at her expense. “I think they’re making fun of me,” she says. (Oh, and the guy she’s to meet never shows.)

Spritzing the ficus while on the office landline, Sherylann gabs with her great aunt Sylvie, catching her up on her life (“still in Forest Hills”) and friends (“who couldn’t find a sitter,” and asked her to sub in). The friends even offered to pay Sherylann: “And I say ‘No, no, no! Of course I’ll do it, and please, don’t offend me with your offer to pay, it’d be my pleasure!’ And the truth of it is that actually, I think of them as my own—oh you have to go?”

And with that, on the verge of Sherylann’s taboo confession, Sylv’s gotta go: there’s pickleball and gal pals and other Florida retirement home activities to enjoy. A septuagenarian, she may be busier than Sherylann, but also seems freer. Maybe this is what there is to look forward to: get past aging kids to enjoy aging sisterhood.

Til then, mid-life’s on the horizon. Time to re-hatch.

Geltman is not interested in seeing her women break out of their no-Ph.D.-required jobs to become literati or “She-E-Os.” Instead, what if growth continues to be more bad dates and more meh jobs and more draining babysitting? If a patriarchal world cannot see how each of these invite opportunities for assessment and growth, Geltman asserts they indeed lead to change: her aunts transform.

One by one, the aunts take on lanky antennae, masks with mandibles, and gasters tipped with a sting. Just as they fear they are being seen as more childish than the actual children in their lives, the aunts become ants.

Geltman offers this physical act as a theatrical manifestation of how small steps outside the women’s comfort zone catalyze indelible change. After the date-that-wasn’t-a-date and the phone call with mom that was somehow worse, Annie tells her coworkers she felt “infantilized … because I don’t have my own family.” (“Or a car,” Renee adds.) But then, Annie felt a change, “like all the cells in my body had been replaced with other cells,” she said. Emerging from a post-breakup funk, she opened herself to the world to see where a weeknight, somewhere off of First Avenue, would take her.

Then, a man—with good hair—emerged from a brownstone and beckoned her:

And it was this incredible, just this incredible experience. There were all these other people there, that didn’t say anything to me, but were all smiling. And we all sat together in this beautiful room, with lots of wood carvings, and we sang, and we chanted together. And I felt… [She is maybe almost crying now] I felt so… Part of something.

Maybe it was a cult. Or maybe it was a beautiful moment of ephemeral connectivity, a gift New York bestows maybe once a leap year—and, somehow, every day.

Sherylann, too, tries something new, and it isn’t going on a date (which she hates) at a steakhouse (which she hates)—instead, she tells off Renee. Sherylann ordering a salad at the chophouse enrages Renee, and over lukewarm coffee and sad chips in the breakroom she unleashes: “We have to take up as little space as possible,” “god forbid I’m a woman and I eat a large piece of meat,” “I’m so sick of this like perpetuation of slash participation in our own oppression.”

Sherylann fires back: “I have free will and I have wants and needs and things that I desire and it’s not all just capitalism and the ‘beauty industrial complex’ and forces outside my control and—I am a human being, Renee! I am a human being with agency!”

Renee, in projecting herself as the most progressive, is also the least reticent to change: she is the last to become an ant. But, she does; the trailblazers before her make it seem not so bad.

Even in a new form, old questions remain. Renee asks, “Aren’t I biologically programmed to want babies?”

Annie responds: “Maybe you were just meant to serve this other function in the span of this tiny blip of biological history.” It’s not fully satisfying to Renee, who takes a moment to reflect, or mourn, or wonder. “Maybe I would be really good at it,” she says.

Now as ants, their lives may be freer, or maybe they won’t be. Not everything will be different, and that’s okay—ants, too, like to snack.