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SISTER

Reviewed by Deborah Klugman

At Theatre/Theater

Through April 19

RECOMMENDED:

Sister opens on a dark bare stage, its single set piece being a plain white toilet, the kind you find in rundown apartments. The story takes place in a crummier section of Hollywood. We learn about that when the main character Denise (Erica Gimpel) directs a trick to her residence, in the vicinity of Western Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard. There’s even a scene where the anxious john stops in at the local El Pollo Loco for a quick bite before proceeding to the rendezvous.

Denise, who makes her living hooking, lives a terrible lonely life, but she’s trying for something better. It’s not just that she goes to auditions (yes, she’s a wannabe actress too) or that she wishes for a materially better existence. What Denise desperately wants, even more than love, is self-respect.

While Sister, written and directed by Michael Phillip Edwards, is a solo show, Denise isn’t the only character in the play. There are also Lorna, a neighboring “ho” with relationship problems, and June, a real estate gal in Palmdale, who confides to Lorna when she’s looking at houses that she too had turned a trick or two back in the day. And there are men: Lorna’s jealous steady guy Leon, who lives off her earnings but stalks her when she’s with other guys, and a couple of Denise’s customers – chiefly Bill, who brings an already turbulent narrative to its convulsive catharsis.

All these individuals are evoked by Gimpel with chameleon-like craft. It’s not merely the successful adoption of multiple personas that makes this an admirable performance, however. It’s the willingness of the performer to go deep, to carry us with her, even though she’s broken, to a bottomless place.

For while Edwards has written this play in a bright brash idiom specific to African-Americans, and while his central character is all woman living a hand-to-mouth existence in L.A., the desperation he writes about in this fluid work bears upon us all.

Theatre/Theater, 5041 Pico Blvd., L.A.; Sat., 2 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through April 19. www.brownpapertickets.com