Bringing ‘Teeth,’ a Feminist Awakening With a Lethal Bite, to the Stage

Michael R. Jackson doesn’t have a vagina. He also doesn’t not have one.

“While I’m not a teen evangelical with teeth in my vagina,” he said, “spiritually I am.”

Jackson’s spectral self-identity was a guiding light as he and the composer Anna K. Jacobs collaborated on “Teeth,” a new musical based on Mitchell Lichtenstein’s 2007 indie scary movie of the same name. It’s about a high school student named Dawn who discovers to her horror that she has vagina dentata — a myth, found across cultures and eras, about a vagina that has a lethal set of chompers. (The film is streaming on Tubi, and the show is in previews Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons before a March 12 opening.)

If you’re going to musicalize a horror movie, “Teeth” is a doozy, and a gamble. Darkly comic and at times stomach-churningly gory, it’s a touchstone of feminist body horror and an exemplar, along with “I Spit on Your Grave” and “Jennifer’s Body,” of a rape-revenge film that indicts misogyny and body shame for the grip they have on women’s sexual autonomy.

Jackson, the show’s lyricist, and, with Jacobs, co-writer of the book, said he was drawn to adapt “Teeth” because of how it frames horror and dark comedy around sex and conservative Christianity — two themes that also raged through his 2022 Broadway musical, “A Strange Loop,” a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winner.

“I know what it’s like to be afraid of your own body and to feel like somebody’s going to catch you masturbating and what that means, that you’re going to go to hell,” said Jackson, who grew up in the Baptist church. “I immediately glommed onto Dawn because I’ve had that internal experience.”

That last line got a laugh from two other members of the “Teeth” creative team who, with Jackson and Jacobs, sat for an interview at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan before a recent matinee: the director, Sarah Benson, and the choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly.

Other than Jacobs — who said she has “an exceptionally low fear threshold” — the musical is the spawn of bona fide horror fans. Jackson said he grew up reading Stephen King novels, which helped him discern that horror is “when something you’re afraid of comes true.”

Kelly, who is partial to horror parodies like the “Scary Movie” franchise, enjoys watching horror movies alone.

“It requires you to be vulnerable,” he explained.

Benson is something of a Grand Guignol maestro, having directed several macabre shows, like Sarah Kane’s despairing play “Blasted” in 2008 at Soho Rep. Benson said her love of horror is rooted in the ways it “opens up a space to look at disturbing and destabilizing human behavior inside a container where fear is the material.”

One of her toughest tasks was how to handle the show’s penile amputations. Every assaultive male appendage — whether attached to Dawn’s crush, her classmate, her doctor — ends up a bloody stub once it makes her vaginal acquaintance.

Onstage, there is a loud crunch each time Dawn’s penis fly trap takes a bite — “It’s very percussive,” said Benson — followed by displays and sprays of blood. Benson said the props team used treated silicone to make the bloodied penises look comical but authentically phallic.

At a recent preview, screams greeted Alyse Alan Louis, who plays Dawn, as she held a male member aloft like Perseus lifting the head of Medusa.

Fearful of her vagina, Dawn keeps her secret from her family and from her friends in her conservative church’s no-sex-till-marriage club. Jacobs, whose other musicals include the Andy Warhol-themed “Pop!,” has been working with Jackson on the show since 2009, when he brought the idea to her. (They both studied musical theater writing at New York University.) Jacobs said a major influence on her score was Christian TikTok, where “teen evangelicalism is sexy” and, as one of her musical numbers proclaims: “Modest is hottest.”

“That helped me recognize that it’s really important to me that the music feel infectious,” she said, so that audiences “would almost want to be part of that group.”

In a phone interview, Lichtenstein said he learned about vagina dentata at Bennington College by way of his adviser, Camille Paglia, a renegade cultural scholar who taught a class on decadent literature. He took the myth and ran with it in “Teeth,” finding inspiration in the monster with “oozing wet teeth” in “Alien” and in the prom-killing powder-keg of religion and repression in “Carrie.”

In addition to horror, Lichtenstein — the son of the Pop Art master Roy Lichtenstein and one of the stars of Ang Lee’s 1993 gay rom-com “The Wedding Banquet” — considers “Teeth” a genre film of another kind.

“The structure is pretty much the same as most superhero origin movies, where they don’t know they have this power and they reject and deny it, but then they can no longer deny it and they learn how to use it and embrace it,” he said.

Like many screen-to-stage adaptations, “Teeth” takes dramaturgical liberties. It combines characters (Dawn’s pastor is now also her father, played by Steven Pasquale) and drops some plot points (a nuclear power plant no longer looms in the distance). It introduces an incel story line for Brad (Will Connolly), Dawn’s abused and abusive stepbrother; a conflicted gay character (Jared Loftin); and a Greek chorus-chorus line of do-gooder teenagers called the Promise Keeper Girls.

Also new is the “chaste greeting,” as Jackson described it, in which Dawn and her evangelical peers say hello with gestures involving crossed arms and hand movements. Together they translate, according to Kelly, as “heart, modesty and, like, hey.” A dance vocabulary, in other words, in which shame and desire are competing forces.

“I think about my relationship to religion and I’m like, well if they start dancing, that’s too sexual, it’s not OK,” Kelly said. “If they’re following the rules, how does the behavior look like dance but follow this rule that they set up for each other that they can’t be close to one another?”

Fans of “Teeth,” the movie, won’t recognize the finale. Lichtenstein built to a dramatic bedroom climax between Brad and Dawn, who embraces her toothy power as a tool for vigilante sexual justice. In the musical, a new ending imagines Dawn and Brad as mythological figures — gods, really — storming across a fantastic, scarlet-colored hellscape where pillars of honest-to-God fire illuminate their literal battle of the sexes.

Lichtenstein said the show hits “the right tone for a young audience and a younger generation.” The creators have his blessing.

“I’m happy to let them explore it in whatever way they want,” he said.

The musical’s sexual libertinism extends beyond the stage. At a small gallery and maker shop inside Playwrights Horizons visitors can learn about and purchase erotic artworks, cheeky educational books (“My Vag”) and sexual aids (sundry vibrators). There’s a sign-up sheet to receive emails from the Brooklyn sex-positive emporium SHAG.

For theatergoers with tender constitutions, “Teeth” may be tough to stomach. To get ahead of complaints, Playwrights Horizons posted on its website a “content transparency statement” — a trigger warning — that cautions audiences about the show’s “intense violence” and “mature content and themes,” including rape and emotional abuse.

Yet at a recent preview, the show’s deliberately cartoonish savagery was met not with walkouts but with raucous cheers from a very Gen Z-looking crowd — a collective roar of approval, perhaps, that a musical is taking up arms against religious sanctimoniousness and sexual shame in a post-Roe America. The show has already been extended two weeks, through April 14.

“Given what is going on in the climate right now, people may be bringing in an extra amount of stuff into the theater when they see the show, and perhaps that makes it especially significant to them,” Jacobs said.

Jackson cautioned against measuring anything against the political and cultural moment “because once you do that, the moment passes.”

Still, he hoped “Teeth” would be a “powerful antidote” to the poison of ideological thinking.

“I don’t want to be told how to live or how to think or what I can say or what I can do,” he said. “That’s why I love our show so much. It’s a container where it’s OK to be a freak.”