WHEN I WAS A GIRL,
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ECHOES
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A GIRL IS A HALF FORMED THING
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When I Was a
Girl I Used to
Scream and Shout,
at
Theatre Row, is a 1984 play by Sharman MacDonald, a kind of sweet-sad overview of a
relationship between a divorced,
middle aged mother (Aiden Moloney)
and her thirtysomething daughter (Barrie Kreinik) told in flashbacks reaching as
far as the
daughters childhood and progressing chronologically to the start
point. The
daughters best friend (Zoe Watkins)
and teenage-years boyfriend (Colby Howell) figure into the mix as well. As
directed by John Keating, it has its charms, and is well acted, but mostly,
I found the play to be hitting very familiar tropes in a way
that made the
narrative predictable, if not schematic, with a few pauses for
stylistic
confusion.
Far
better
is the first entry in 59E59’s annual Brits off-Broadway festival,
Echoes,
by acclaimed comedy writer Henry
Naylor. working in an
uncharacteristically
serious mode. Here’s the boilerplate: “Echoes tells
the
parallel stories [in alternating monologues] of two women born 175
years apart.
One is a Victorian pioneer woman (Felicity Houlbrooke), the other an Islamist schoolgirl
(Filipa
Braganca). The former
wants to build an
Empire, the latter a Caliphate. Both women are idealists and
intelligent
adventurers…”
But
what awaits them in their new societies, and what happens to their
beliefs and
ideals amount to radical, dramatic, victorious, horrible and in
some respects eerily similar rites
of passage.
Co-directed
by Naylor and Emma Buttler, and
performed by the named actresses with depth and sensitivity, the
play is but an
hour long; but its haunting power lingers far, far longer.
I did a little bit
of research on
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing,
because I found the piece to be rough going, and I
didn’t want to be
summarily dismissive of a work that has clearly affected enough
people to be
imported (from Ireland’s Corn Exchange Theatre Company to the Jerome Robbins stage of the Baryshnikov
Arts Center), based in
turn upon a novel which has affected
even more people. The novel of the same title is by Elmear
McBride, and it’s a
stream-of-consciousness story about the
hard life of a young girl, including the death of a brother,
other tragedy and
sexual abuse, leading to her suicide. It is written in both low
slang and high
style, because the language is fragmented, incomplete and
sometimes even
abstract; we are meant not only to see things through the girl’s
eyes, but to
experience her thoughts as they come, without filtering,
neatening or
reflection. Adapter-director Annie Ryan’s script is perforce a significant
reduction of the text, and
performer Aofie Duffin presents
us with a creature who is both an innocent waif and haunted by
having seen too
much before her time, irreparably damaged, traveling through
states of bitter
humor, horror, anger and self-induced narcosis to distance
herself from her own
body when it’s assaulted.
Obviously
nothing like this is going to be a barrel of laughs, and to
deliver it with the
integrity of the source material, you just have to go there, as
you envision
what “going there” must be; but this is one of those portraits of
unremitting
bleakness that, to me, never show the reason why they must exist. Nothing wrong with a grim
truth, but the art
is in the why. And
I found that
nothing but Why me? or more
accurately, Why her?, as the
character herself is possessed of a self-numbing fatalism, was
not enough. If
you check reviews of the novel at Amazon, you’ll find reactions
are all over
the map, as befitting this kind of storytelling and narrative
technique.
As
to the audience reaction when I attended? Much approbation for the
performer.
The audience appeared to be in hypnotic concentration for the 80
minutes
duration—attaining that is no mean accomplishment. But the (these
days)
obligatory standing ovation for a tour de force well done? Not so
much.
Admiration may not have extended whole-heartedly to approval.
I’m
afraid your potential response cannot be gauged against mine. All
I can tell
you is that your mileage may vary.
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