Cherry Jones (photo: Joan Marcus)
Having had the pleasure of seeing and enjoying two of Sarah
Treem's plays ("A Feminine Ending," at Playwrights Horizons and
"The How and the Why" at the McCarter Theater), I went to her third
play with high expectations, many of which were met in the excellent production
afforded it by the Manhattan Theater Club.
A major plus was the casting of Cherry Jones, who is following up her
stunning performance last season in "The Glass Menagerie" in a role
that once again shows her off as an actor that you must see no matter what she
is in.
In this play, she is superb as the dedicated, no nonsense
owner/manager of a Bed & Breakfast off the coast of Seattle. As an independent
but socially committed spirit, she quietly and courageously uses her skills to
maintain a safe house for abused/ brutalized women. The play is set in 1972 at the time when
women were making waves and taking a particularly robust stand on feminist issues.
Outspoken and an activist in her own way Agnes (Jones) is
former nurse who lost her license for performing an abortion. She has not lost
her skill or her compassion for those who find their way to her, but who, nevertheless,
have to comply with her strict rules and regulations in order not to upset the
regular guests. Her daily life is assertively free of activism, but rather one
of commitment to the raising of her teenage daughter Penny (Morgan Saylor), and
keeping her as best as she can from the issues that confront those whom she
shelters.
The engrossing play centers about the relationship that develops
between the sexually naive but nevertheless typically rebellious Penny and the
battered married runaway Mary Anne (Zoe Kazan) who attempts to show Penny how
to get a man's attention. A sound and fury-propelled Lesbian African-American
activist Hannah (Cherise Boothe) finds her way into the mix to bring a little tumult
to Agnes's life, as does an ingratiating Paul (Patch Darragh), a thirty-something
divorced song-writer from San Francisco with an eye for MaryAnne.
Although we get the feeling that Treem's intention is to
stuff as much feminist ideology into the plot as possible, each one of the short,
swiftly paced and excellently acted scenes, under the expert direction of Pam
MacKinnon (the most recent Broadway revival of "Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?"), moves logically and persuasively from one dramatic crisis to the
next. While Treem's messaging is a bit problematic and is arguably made too paramount
throughout, she is crafty enough of a playwright to make each of her characters
interesting and credible.The play's expected explosive climax and its bittersweet resolve
are played out dynamically within Scott Pask's fine single setting.
One little complaint: characters in the playbill should be
listed in order of appearance, not in alphabetical order, to help the
audience (forget the critic) know who is/was
and when.
"When We Were Young and Unafraid"
Manhattan Theater Club, at the City Center Stage 1. 131 W.
55th St.
For tickets ($89.00) go to ManhattanTheatreClub.com
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