Cold Tangerines: The Play

Reviewed by Pauline Adamek

Playwright-performer Lynn Downey Braswell was apparently so taken by Shauna Niequist’s 2007 memoir/short story collection that she adapted it to become her stage vehicle. Portraying Shauna, the show’s narrator, Braswell’s frank, confessional and sometimes amusing style of performance serves the material well.

In Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life — the first of three books of personal remembrances — Niequist relates tales about God and life that aspire to celebrate the extraordinary moments nesting within our everyday existence.

Cold Tangerines: The Play, however, is an insufferable collage of mundane episodes and tedious navel gazing, as observed and interpreted through a lens of extreme neuroticism, while grasping for some meaningful epiphany. Inexplicably broken into two acts, the 90-minute show (including intermission) of rambling soul searching, self-loathing and bleated insecurities feels interminable. Act 2 explores worry, terror and writer’s block before arriving at a hopeful resolution.

Braswell has taken Niequist’s essays and, rather than presenting a static monologue, livens things up by having three actors portray various facets of her brittle and overly anxious personality. Hence, opening night’s cast included Betsy Roth, Susannah Hicks and a marvelous Kira Shea as Shauna’s inner voices — respectively, Anna (the maternal side), Nadia (the hyper-critical bulimic self), and Shea (the perfectionist).

Signpost scene-titles throughout Shauna’s journey into self-discovery — such as “Carrying My Own Weight” and “Becoming Family” — are written on cards, which are held up, their title stated, and then stuck to the wall within little picture frames. This overly emphatic device is further accentuated by an intense lighting flash paired with an audible tone sound. Yes, we get it.

Explorations of religion, yoga and vegetarianism eventually bring Shauna to a place of self-loving and “gratitude,” having attained “a depth of wisdom, now that I am a mother.”

Aspiring to be more than a needy woman’s saga, Cold Tangerines: The Play presents the author as cheerleader articulating her cautionary tale to boost others. The intention is pure, but the result is tedious.

Cold Tangerines: The Play Fremont Centre Theatre, 1000 Fremont Ave. (at El Centro), South Pasadena; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through June 29. (866) 811-4111, www.fremontcentretheatre.com