HOW LONG HAS it been since you were a greasy teenager, bursting with confusing hormones and thinking you had the world down pat? Carlien (Erika Breytenbach-Marais) and her once bestie Caitlin (Faeron Wheeler) come face to face after 20 years in Your Perfect Life, and it ain’t all sunshine and roses. See it at Theatre on the Square in Sandton, until 20 April 2024.

The headily cringeworthy thing about high school reunions is that you are not the same person you were ten or twenty years ago. And you might not want to revisit that person or her friends, with all the juvenile and giggly intrigues that came with being a teenager back in the day. Indeed, like social media, when you go stalking people you knew as a child, if you’re women, you’re basically interested in a lookie-loo kind of sense at one liners: Who are they married to? How many children do they have? And how (of course) uglily have they aged? If you’re men, it’s about money and conquests, baldness and the size of your respectively boeps.

And if the answer to all three (staying with women stereotypes) is not, none and beautifully, you lose interest rather rapidly. Or maybe as rapidly as your woman friend becomes offended at your stereotypical nosiness and subsequent withdrawal of interest. But Carlien and Caitlin were indeed best friends in high school. They shared secrets and boyfriends, dreams of world travel together and wine bottles. Then life took over and their dreams dissolved into other things. Carlien’s cute pictures of her ideal family leaves busy and important Caitlin’s eyes instantly glassing over.

But then, over alcohol in a plastic training cup from the mommy bag, and with stilettos tossed awry, the boasts dilute into anger. Poignant issues erupt. There’s a little pet mouse on a wheel, as one’s (only) listener and an elderly father with a broken heart, as the other’s, and you, in the audience, realise that neither woman has a perfect life, and they are both painfully aware of that fact.  

Your Perfect Life is an essay – of the ilk of the British podcast series The End of the Line – about how the world works, particularly if you are a woman, in terms of oft offensive social expectations and keeping everything in order. And while there are some beautiful lines and nifty levels of engagement which gets each woman to evaluate her life’s choices – they’re both close to 40 – and sometimes come up with sad answers, it is a work that would have been strengthened with more extremes and less platitudes. It’s about the basic schism between choosing marriage and children over a career.

On several levels, it’s a “chick” drama with the complexity of looking at a mirror image that has aged and not always wisened, and raising high school demons that should be buried rather than taken seriously. It’s an entertaining and very brief piece of work that lacks a strong denouement but makes up for it in its cringeworthy and hilarious sense of the mandatory, given that it all takes place on the formerly feared and hallowed high school grounds.

Your Perfect Life is directed by Sue Diepeveen and written by Erika Breytenbach-Marais and Faeron Wheeler. Performed by Faeron Wheeler and Erika Breytenbach-Marais, featuring set contributions by Ros Marsh and Simmy Designs, it is produced by F Creations and Daphne Kuhn, stage managed by Regina Dube assisted by Melidah Thakadu, with technical management by Loftus Mohale assisted by Reggie Mathebe. It is onstage at Theatre on the Square in Sandton until 20 April 2024.