“Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece! My, soon you’ll have all of New York clamoring for your work!” Thus reads a speech balloon in Roy Lichtenstein’s Masterpiece, a classic painting of a comic book panel that highlights the Pop art icon at his most satirical. Masterpiece sold for $165 million in 2017, making it his most expensive piece to date. Beneath the flashy, even kitschy smattering of Ben-Day dots, however, hides a ruthless self-reflexivity: a playful irony that, at best, pokes fun at the superficiality of artistic success, even Lichtenstein’s own. At worst—or at its most cynical—it damns a hyper-capitalist art market that converts intellectual elitism into social capital with near-industrial regularity.
On some level, filmmaker Mitchell Lichtenstein inherits his father’s larger-than-life brand of social commentary. His 2007 comedy-horror classic, Teeth, follows the awakening—sexual, feminist, and otherwise—of Dawn O’Keeffe, an evangelical teenager with a sexual superpower of sorts: teeth in her vagina. Even now, long after the film’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007, Teeth boasts an ever-growing cult following—if anything, online streaming only helped Teeth attract the popularity it lacked during its run in theaters.
Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright Michael R. Jackson, however, takes Lichtenstein’s premise to even wilder heights in perhaps film’s unlikeliest afterlife: a “coming-of-rage” musical, which ran from March 2024 through January 2025 at New York’s New World Stages. Jackson’s off-Broadway adaptation of Teeth is complete with all the visual and intellectual maximalism he brought to his previous shows. If his breakout Tony Award-winning meta-musical, A Strange Loop packs its 100-minute runtime with several sermons’ worth of commentary on sex and theology, Teeth puts a campier twist on Jackson’s pseudo-homilies. Teeth revels in its own theatricality while drawing on the site-specific imagery of “frontier Christianity,” proving a worthier heir—maybe even a savior—to the Pop art tradition he indirectly succeeds. Jackson’s horror both pops and bites, its obsession with sex and salvation sinking its teeth into America’s darker parts—where even the hellbound deserve a standing ovation.
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“I think the line I’ve been going with is, ‘While I’m not a teen evangelical with teeth in my vagina, spiritually I am.’”
I spoke with Jackson over Zoom, a few weeks after I’d seen Teeth on a spontaneous trip to New York. Even over the unreliable Wi-Fi at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center in Death Valley National Park, I sensed traces of the incisive humor that sharpened the musical’s bite. Jackson’s comedic instinct takes on biblical proportions in Teeth: humor—as much as horror—lies at the musical’s heart.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot to poke fun at. Jackson, along with his co-writer, Anna K. Jacobs (composer of “Pop!,” a musical adapting Andy Warhol’s murder), takes full advantage of the source material’s absurdity, breathing new life into the already-wild story. Steven Pasquale plays “Pastor,” Dawn’s stepfather and the raging patriarch of New Testament Village, a Christofascist commune in middle-of-nowhere America (his fanatical hollering opens the musical: “WOMAN? WHERE IS YOUR FIG LEAF? WOMAN? WHERE IS YOUR SHAME?”). Dawn, played by Alyse Alan Louis, also takes on a new backstory as leader of the Promise Keeper Girls, a Greek chorus of similarly prudish teenagers who morph into an army of Bacchants in time for the musical’s gory finale. Jackson’s screen-to-stage adaptation also involves some more straightforward changes: for example, he removes Dawn’s mother from the plot; Brad, Dawn’s incel stepbrother played by Will Connolly, plays a more prominent role instead. Under the shepherding of “Godfather” (also Pasquale), an online “manosphere” personality, Brad develops a vocabulary crucial to his “Red Pill” crusade. Brad blames “Male pain” on what he terms the “feminocracy”—a conspiracy to suppress “male potential.”
Such a cast—all of whom suffer from repression in one way or another—affords many an opportunity for satire. After Pastor’s tirade on the “especially awesome message of female empowerment through sexual purity,” Dawn and her entourage of PKGs burst into “Precious Gift,” a subtly threatening anthem celebrating virginity. “Modest is hottest,” Dawn and her boyfriend, Tobey, proclaim in a hopelessly horny Christian folk duet. Still, Jackson’s approach to humor takes on a kind of empathy: none of his characters feel like caricatures.
“They’re fundamentalist Christians,” he says, “and there are opportunities for humor in imagining them as complete people.”
In fact, the horror of Teeth lies in the nauseating realization that it contains hardly any serious exaggerations. Finding a personality like Brad or Godfather only takes a few clicks on Instagram or Reddit, and the rabid purity culture Teeth satirizes exists everywhere, not just in pockets of rural America. Jackson himself grew up Baptist in Detroit, and Teeth, like A Strange Loop, dwells on all-too-real anxieties surrounding sexuality and religion that no amount of laugh-out-loud songwriting can sanitize. On some level, then, Jackson aims for more than satire: even the musical’s bawdiest moments point to the all-consuming torment of living—and longing—in a body.
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Even so, Jackson takes care not to judge. Once again, he considers his brand of social criticism a project that requires radical—even risky—empathy.
“In that sense, I have to be more of an actor than a writer,” he says. “I need to treat every one of my characters like different versions of myself.”
For Jackson, this kind of psychological exercise helps produce what he calls “worthy antagonists,” not cartoons. Jackson’s rendering of Brad comes as a prime example “He’s right about something,” Jackson points out. “He’s right that Dawn has teeth in her vagina.” Indeed, Brad’s “male pain” comes from somewhere: “She bit me / It bit me,” he sings while trying to recall a rather incestuous childhood encounter with Dawn’s vagina dentata. Brad hardly deserves our sympathy—but at least he earns our faith. Though unmistakably villainous, Jackson affords him a psychological complexity absent in Lichtenstein’s film. This, along with several other dramaturgical liberties—for example, the insertion of Ryan, a character who livestreams his sexual encounter with Dawn to prove his heterosexuality, a subversion of the “gay best friend” trope—add dimension to the story beyond its initial shock value.
Jackson’s aspirations—to step outside oneself, to reach for another reality, another body—verge on the ecstatic, not unlike the sexuality he confronts in Teeth. Offstage, his fixation on “transgression” turns hilariously metatheatrical: at New World Stages, ushers distribute ponchos to front-row theatergoers who enjoy the musical’s Grand Guignol climax from a “splash zone”—Teeth requires two gallons of stage blood every week. At a gallery outside the theater, visitors can purchase erotic artwork, sex-ed books, and even vibrators.
For all his concern with interiority, however, Jackson’s heroines seem to flatten as Teeth barrels toward an apocalyptic finale (also Jackson’s innovation). Following a string of “killings” (when Tobey, Dawn’s boyfriend, tries to assault her, Dawn’s teeth take their vaginal vengeance), Dawn learns to embrace her “Precious Gift.” Climaxing, however, proves a problem. For one thing, Teeth seems unable to shed the trope of many rape-revenge narratives: that art depicting the monstrous feminine directs more attention to female violence against men than the feminine body in and of itself. We lose some of the personal anguish that previously motivated the musical’s emotional arc (the kind of self-hatred Dawn sings of in “Shame in My Body,” for example). What happens to that shame? Where can generations of violence, sexual or otherwise, end up? Gazing up at seventy-five severed phalli hanging from the ceiling, I began to wonder if the audience’s laughter—including mine—only served as evidence of distance. Proof of teeth.