Lark Eden covers the lives intertwined
through friendship of three Southern women from their final high school
days, 1935, to about 2010. Natalie Symons started it as a novel. To
tell it via all three voices, though, she decided--influenced by Love
Letters---to make it a play. From the narration that sets its
little-town origin and the women's relationship to it and each other,
Lark Eden is still a novel, an epistolary one. It's delivered in the
basic theatrical form of group oral interpretation of literature:
Readers Theater. Director Karla Hartley even places the interpreters
behind stands containing their scripts, and though they gesture, speak
emotionally and occasionally face one another, they do not engage in
physical or dramatic meetings or interaction. Not that Emily, Mary,
Thelma as well as episodes and people in their lives aren't well drawn
and involving: but the women tell us about their actions and each
other rather than show. Because Symons commendably individualizes their
voices and characters, while her imagery is often vivid and humor
engaging, the narrative holds our interest overall. This, despite
wearying repetition of devices to indicate such things as passing of
time (like Christmas card messages and worries about wars),
frustrations over being stuck caring for relations (crude physical
descriptions of husband, grandmother, mother), and plans for the women
to get together for a gals-only reunion. There's also a descent into
almost pure melodrama after intermission.
As Emily, the moderate (and often moderator between the others), Jeni
Bond projects the sweetest of dispositions. She's a would-be poet, a
worrier over sad world events who doesn't wed until (!) 28, and to a
travelling salesman. Despite disappointments in her personal life,
Bond's Emily comes off credibly as the one who retires early to
Florida, but to work in a deli, and finds happiness with her dog .
Playwright Symons confidently voices Thelma, for whom absorption in her
religion makes her see everything as God's plan, though perhaps working
its ways mysteriously. She's the first to marry because she liked being
wanted by the man who asked and she felt he'd be a good husband, father
and thus provider. With all her talk of their having children and her
church activities, along with prayers for and exhortations to her
girlfriends, there's little mention of any tribulations. Wide-eyed
Symons suggests in her calm manner that Thelma is mindless of roiling
problems or trying to cover them up beneath a surface of often cited
faith. Mary is the tart-tongued rebel against convention in Roxanne
Fay's humorous yet penetrating portrayal. She's the good bad girl stuck
with caring for a prune-faced, toothless, one-legged grandma and a
complaining mother who keeps trying to hook a man for Mary. Roxanne
deftly delivers wisdom through wise cracks, but makes it clear that
Mary can only flee responsibilities or defy customary morality so far.
She's the nearest thing to a dramatic antagonist.
Playwright Symons and director Hartley forge a trio who recall
dramatized steel magnolias yet appear really more like roses, a mix of
colorful soft petals, strong stems and thorns. They should smell sweet,
whether on a stage or in the pages of a book, to a lot of southern
ladies and maybe their gentlemen too. If I were Mary, though, I would
sign off on the two hour and ten minute staged interpretation as if on
an ironic Greeting from her Happyland!