To the Bone
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Open Fist Theatre at Atwater Village Theatre
Thru November 5
Writer/director Catherine Butterfield’s women-centered dramedy is set in a working-class community south of Boston, where two sisters of Irish-Catholic extraction, Kelly (Tisha Terrasini-Banker) and Maureen (Amanda Weier), share a house once owned and occupied by their grandmother. The place is a throwback to a distant past, its walls replete with black and white family photos from generations back, as well as the requisite crucifix strategically displayed.
As teens, the siblings had terrorized their peers with vituperative tongues; now, 20-odd years later, only one of them has changed. Whereas the primly dressed Maureen has enrolled in. and heeded, all sorts of lessons in self-improvement, Kelly remains much the same: loudmouthed, tactless and without a clue when it comes to the effect of her words and actions on others.
Besides these women, the house is home to Kelly’s truculent 19-year-old son Sean (Jack David Sharpe), the progeny of her first husband, long dead. (The second husband’s gone too.) But Kelly has another child — a daughter born several years before Sean when Kelly was only 17 and emotionally and financially ill-equipped to be a parent. The infant had been given up for adoption — but, as the play opens, Kelly and this now-grown daughter are about to be reunited. Waiting for the young woman to arrive, Kelly darts about in a state of high anxiety, expressed with much profane language. Maureen advises calm and admonishes her sister to behave with more restraint.
Finally, the daughter arrives — a different kind of person from her birth mother. Geneva (Alice Kors) has been brought up in a privileged upper-middle class home. She’s pleasant but self-involved; while pleased to be there, she behaves as if a traveler in another country. That impression is reinforced by the presence of a companion, her roommate Darcy (Kacey Mayeda) — a film student who touts a camera for the purpose of recording this family reunion, which starts out well but ends in tears.
Notwithstanding these soap opera elements, To the Bone has the makings of an entertaining evening. The characters are colorful and the dialogue sound. The humor is born of human foible. The arc of the story is Kelly’s journey towards transformation into a wiser, kinder woman. Sometimes that’s the kind of story you want to see told.
But, aspects of the direction — and the acting — need calibrating. Some of the scenes between the two sisters lean into sitcom. As Kelly (carrying the weight of the dialogue, and my hat’s off for that) Terrasini-Banker plays the comedy in the beginning a tad too broad, while Weier at the top is still a bit stiff. Only later, when the comic elements of the plot recede, do these performers deliver more authentic moments. Also, I kept wondering how much of their energy was being taken up with maintaining those New England dialects (which, frankly, sounded awfully New York-ish to me).
As Geneva, Kors slips without effort into the role of an entitled rich girl, while Mayeda does fine as a struggling scholarship student with a bigger heart. I found Sharpe, with his mocking sardonic air, interesting to watch, but miscast and/or under-directed as a youth with heavy-duty problems.
Jan Munroe’s scenic design is serviceable, albeit on the drab side; for some reason he’s designed Geneva and Darcy’s dorm room on top a small raised platform — which keeps the actors unnecessarily confined to a limited playing area. Gavan Wyrick’s lighting in the same scene appeared unnecessarily dim, while Mylette Nora’s costuming of both Geneva and Maureen struck me as overly retro, more appropriate to the 1950s than 2013 when the play takes place. Both costumes are meant to convey an opting for conservative garb, but still..
Finally, a scene where Kelly and Maureen are together in a car, with Maureen driving, needs a redo. The two would be dead a dozen times over given the number of times Maureen takes a hand off the wheel and her eyes off the road.
Open Fist Theatre, Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave, Atwater; Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 7 p.m., Sat.- Sun., 2 pm, dark Oct. 29; thru Nov. 5. www.openfist.org Running time: approximately two hours with an intermission.
