THEATRE REVIEW:
KPBS AIRDATE: November 04, 2005
It’s a wild week for onstage women. They’re going to
war, birthing monsters and having a heckuva time getting a decent date. There’s
nothin’ like a dame – in “A Piece of My Heart,” “Bad Dates” and “The
Frankenstein Project.”
Halloween was the perfect night for Sledgehammer to
launch “The Frankenstein Project v.2.0.” The original incarnation emerged from
the crypt in 1999, as a work in progress. Director Kirsten Brandt adapted the
piece from Mary Shelley’s world-famous 1818 Gothic novel. The familiar story concerns
a monster created by a young student. Longing for sympathy and shunned by
society, the creature ultimately turns evil and takes deadly revenge on the
student for trying to play God. In Brandt’s version, the student is a female,
and so is her fiendish creation. Looming over them, reciting from the original
text, is a very pregnant Mary Shelley. The three Marys make an unholy trinity
that underscores the recurring religion vs. science debates. Brandt has a great
deal on her mind, from face transplants to stem cell research, birth and
motherhood, dreams, death, resurrection, rape, abandonment and the human soul.
It’s a lot to cram into 100 minutes. But the direction is precise, the
performances meticulous, and the stage pictures are often gorgeous, thanks to
the set, light and video design of David Lee Cuthbert. There’s also a
deliciously creepy soundscape by Jeff Mockus. You may not understand everything
that flies by with eerie volubility, but the play will certainly unnerve and
disturb you.
“A Piece of My Heart” is unsettling, too. But this
discomfort is born of fact, not fiction. Shirley Lauro based her 1991 play on
the Keith Walker book of interviews with 26 female Vietnam veterans. Some
15,000 women volunteered to serve in Southeast Asia during the war, but
amazingly, the exact number isn’t known. Six women’s stories, interwoven
monologues, crisply directed, excellently performed, give us a gut-wrenching
glimpse of the journey from ambition to horror to disillusionment to healing.
In the Veteran’s Museum and Memorial Center, the history surrounds us, and as
the death toll mounts in another aimless war, the play and production – by
Mo’olelo Theatre -- are more relevant than ever.
Now, for a little comic relief, there’s “Bad Dates”
at the San Diego Repertory Theatre. Haley has a shoe-fetish, a job with the
Romanian mob, and a shortage of decent men. Written by Theresa Rebeck in 2003,
the one-woman comedy is one of this season’s ten most produced plays in
professional theaters nationwide. Audiences are howling – bilingually. The Rep
just initiated a program of concurrent Spanish translation for three
performances a week. The play breaks no new ground, but DeAnna Driscoll is such
marvelous company, you’d spend an evening with her any time… in any language.
These women are no
shrinking violets; they’re steel magnolias.
©2005 Patté Productions
Inc.