The three young women onstage are helping the audience distinguish between good touches and bad touches. All three wear cute orange and green costumes, which match the safety-cone orange and slime-green accents of the set. It’s a playful environment, meant to suggest a whimsical and attention-grabbing kids television show. And so much about the experience of Darb TV perfectly captures that spirit, from the hot colors to the stuffed-animal-like talking puppet stage-right that sometimes functions as host and guide.

At the moment, though, Monica Mirabile (who also designed the costumes) and Rebecca Nagle stand arms akimbo to either side of Sarah Tooley at this Nov. 2 press preview, and Tooley asks the audience to call out an example of a “good” touch. “A hug,” somebody offers. “A high five,” another voice calls. With each good touch, Nagle and Mirabile mime a childlike expression of joy, smiling and turning their palms up in a gleeful sort of way. Tooley then asks for bad touches, and the audience responds. “ A slap,” one voice calls, and with that Nagle and Mirabile cross their arms and frown.

Tooley then begins to push boundaries. What about when your father kisses your owie on your leg? “Good,” the audience responds. “What about when your father kisses your leg in your bed?” another one of the young women asks. The audience sits silent, and the expressionless Nagle and Mirabile push the now rhetorical questions into the uncomfortable with arresting speed: What about when your father kisses you in your bed and he’s drunk? What about when your father kisses you in your bed and he’s drunk and naked? What about when your father kisses you in your bed and he’s drunk and has an erection?

Darb TV, obviously, is not a kids show, but that it chooses to embrace that format, even tangentially, speaks to the power of its presentation and the intelligence behind its creation. Written by Nagle and realized by Nagle, Mirabile, and Tooley under the direction of Natalya Brusilovsky, the performance leaps from moments of casual and childish humor to moments of significant trauma. Sometimes these shifts are jarring and abrupt. Sometimes they’re rather seamless. That both are equally uncomfortable strengthens some of the performance’s ideas about the passive acceptance of sexual abuse.

As a performance artist, Nagle (“Playing the Dozen,” Art, June 10, 2009) has fearlessly tackled issues of the body, power, and boundary pushing before in ways that straddle outright performance and theatrical narrative. Darb TV represents her latest step closer to outright conventional theater without sacrificing the interactive and psychological reach of her performance work. “When I was writing the play I had the idea for some themes,” Nagle says by phone during a brief interview Nov. 4. “And I kept asking myself, ‘What’s the format? How am I going to put this all together?’ And then I thought, a fairy tale, or a kids story—like the Brothers Grimm and Mother Goose. And then I started leaning more toward a kids TV show.”

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