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From westword.com Originally published by Westword 2005-05-19 ©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
Girls'
Night Out
Playwright's cozy Shaking the Dew works despite
some flaws.
By Juliet Wittman
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I found Shaking the Dew From the Lilies, now at the
Playwright Theatre, enjoyable in the same way I found nights with
girlfriends enjoyable in my twenties. Clad in pajamas or our underwear,
we'd dissect each other's relationships amid peals of satirical laughter at
the general obtuseness of men, assure each other that, no, we weren't too
fat, too skinny, too needy or too aggressive, compare breast sizes in the
mirror and drain a bottle or two of wine. Like those long-ago pajama
parties, with their sleepy 2 a.m. pauses and endless repetition of specific
themes, Shaking the Dew has aimless or boring passages -- but it's all so cozy and amiable that you don't really mind.
Five women are trapped in a shopping-mall
bathroom. This is a pretty contrived premise (one
of the audience members commented afterward that if it had been five men,
the door would have been off its hinges in fifteen minutes flat), but the
script and the actresses have enough charm to carry it off. Naturally,
these five women are very different; their paths would have been unlikely
to cross under any other circumstances. Cynthia is a repressed society girl
who says she has never used a public restroom before. Her introduction to slutty Tami occurs when the latter sprays cheap
hairspray around the entire mirror area and into her face. There's some bickering about toilet paper, and then
Susan and Aja enter. They're
a fairly typical girlfriend coupling: Aja is the
sexy woman, Susan the heavier, plainer one who basks in her friend's
glamorous glow. We will eventually discover the depths of envious rage beneath
Susan's pleasant exterior. The group is joined by
thoughtful, quiet Nicole, who turns out -- of course -- to be gay. There's something daring and original about the play's
funky setting and about the women's candor regarding sex and other bodily
functions, the references to smells, the way the dialogue is periodically
punctuated by the sounds of urination and toilets flushing. But the early
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MaryLee Herrmann
(from left), Laura Norman (standing), Tara Casanova, Kate Avallone and Nina Grayson in Shaking the Dew From
the Lilies.
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jokes are pretty feeble (how funny is it,
really, to see Cynthia walking around with her skirt caught up in her
panties to spasms of suppressed laughter from the others?), and the
dialogue is the cliché girly stuff you get on television: talk of droopy
breasts, annoying pantyhose, how it's possible to be a feminist without
being nasty, some nonsense about women's coffee-drinking habits revealing
their innermost feelings about sex, a reference to women ripping off their
bras.
Everyone in sequence -- well, almost everyone -- describes her
first sexual encounter. And, dear God, is there a
woman anywhere on this sweet earth -- or at least in fiction -- who isn't
struggling to throw off the influence of a selfish, manipulative,
insensitive or perfectionist mother?
Eventually, the women begin to reveal their secrets to each other.
When prim Cynthia breaks down, it's genuinely shocking,
but this is followed far too soon -- before we can fully digest its
implications -- by Tami's revelation of childhood trauma. Sequential
confessions are a staple of drama in our therapy-saturated culture, but
they need to go somewhere. Tearful monologues don't,
in themselves, supply a satisfying sense of climax and resolution. This
weakness in the script is underlined by the fact
that director Cynthia Davies has so many of the revelations delivered from
the same spot on the stage.
But somehow the play does prevail. There's
something disarming in the way the women come to understand each other in
their cluttered, exhausted and enforced intimacy. MaryLee
Herrmann's Tami grows on you as the evening progresses, as does Nina
Grayson's phlegmatic Nicole. Susan is a difficult role, more a collection
of disconnected comments than a human being. Tara
Casanova makes her simply matter-of-fact. Kate Avallone
and Laura Norman bring real depth to their characterizations, and that
animates the evening. Avallone's Aja is sexy, charming and vulnerable, and she responds
empathetically to the other characters. At one point, she holds the
audience mesmerized with a poem about orgasm that somehow manages to be
more lyrical than raunchy. As Cynthia, Laura Norman has a sly, understated
humor and a perfect sense of timing; she also makes you see the iron
control her character routinely imposes on herself. When Cynthia finally
breaks down -- with the help of a bottle of gin -- you can almost hear her
heart cracking.
I think this play will get better and better the longer the five actresses work together -- though I do wish playwright
Paddy Gillard-Bentley, who is in Denver for this production, would trim and focus the
script. Still, I found myself smiling as I left. Everyone needs a
girlfriend fix now and then.
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