“Nothing is fair.” Well, at least she doesn’t have to worry if she’ll have enough venison to make it through the winter. “I watch too much TV,” this Jane complains. Brunstetter uses in the 1840s scenes, which is neither period-appropriate nor playfully anachronistic, starts to irk, as do the sorrows of present-day Jane, who should have been packed off to a therapist years ago. The parallels between pioneer days and the present become more pointed, and the language Ms. to indulge in suffering when you haven’t actually suffered anything.

Vaynberg’s expressive hands, contemporary Jane’s sly humor and cringing embarrassment feel wonderfully real and raw, horrible and funny, as in her woeful description of the onset of menarche: “It’s like when your body starts to tell you the truth about your life.” Her encounter with Billy (Juan Arturo), a sweaty devil-may-care soccer player, is a wincing delight.Īfter that, the play makes a forward leap to Jane’s thwarted adulthood and becomes a more formulaic piece about whether it’s O.K. “The Oregon Trail” is a great improvement, particularly in its nifty first half-hour. As a consequence the work has felt stilted and sometimes precious. Brunstetter, a writer for the NBC show “This Is Us,” has scripted earlier plays - “Be a Good Little Widow,” “Oohrah!”- that include characters who seem to act not according to their own whims and desires, but to set up the next joke. Then: The number one killer of the actual Oregon Trail, cholera is an infection. Would she like to begin her journey in March, April or May? - “when the sun starts to smolder and your bangs stick to your face no matter what you do, and you are disgusting.” Today, travelers can follow the trail along Route 66 or Routes 2 and 30. As Jane plays the game, the computer voice presents her with increasingly personal choices. The play, directed by Geordie Broadwater, is a feisty, formally inventive comedy. Medicine kits the pioneers carried to treat diseases and wounds included patent medicine physicing pills, castor oil, rum or whiskey, peppermint oil, quinine for malaria, hartshorn for snakebite, citric acid for scurvy, opium, laudanum, morphine, calomel, and tincture of camphor. Only one of them has to worry about whether or not her team of oxen can ford the river. If evenly spaced along the length of the Oregon Trail, there would be a grave every 50 yards from Missouri to Oregon City. Both Janes are self-involved, a little whiny and burdened with a goody-goody big sister (Laura Ramadei).

Meanwhile, a century and a half earlier, another Jane (Emily Louise Perkins) prepares to traverse the country in a covered wagon. In Bekah Brunstetter’s “The Oregon Trail,” produced by Fault Line Theater, Jane (Liba Vaynberg), a 13-year-old in the 1990s, is playing the titular game - a wildly popular piece of edutainment software that taught a generation of kids about pioneer life - in her school’s computer lab. Being a teenage girl is the worst! The unrequited crushes, the cascading hormones, the constant threat of cholera.

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