Denise Leitner, Anna Giannotis, Denise Scheerer, Melissa R. Randel, Lea Floden, Jeffrey SS Johnson and Jacqueline Wright (Photo by Billy W. III Bennight)
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Moving Arts Theatre
Through July 19
RECOMMENDED
Sorry, written by Melissa R. Randel and co-directed by Randel and Larry Biederman, opens on a bizarre, rather unsettling image: three women, not young, dressed in varying undergarments (costumes by Rosalida Medina), stand on their respective chairs, their necks encircled by a yellow ribbon whose other end suspends from the ceiling. A song signifying wistful regret, reminiscent of a French ballad, filters through the background, playing several times over. Each woman delivers a short monologue, only one of which seems to make sense. Is this a mock suicide attempt? Or a real one? It’s hard to judge, like so much else that’s presented to us in this surreal play, which is both entertaining and truthful while yet proceeding in an utterly bewildering fashion.
The three women are very different. Francine (Jacqueline Wright) is a woman of our times, a tough-as-nails attorney at the top of her game who has nonetheless just lost a very important case involving gender discrimination. Lillian (Lea Floden), emanating a much softer, more vulnerable persona, is from the 19thcentury and entrapped in a loveless marriage while a relationship with the person she loves, Emily, remains impossible. Persephone (Randel) is the goddess herself, in person; she is spending her annual six months here on earth and pretty sure she doesn’t want to go back to life in Hades, with her controlling Neanderthal-minded husband/uncle, Pluto. While Francine and Lillian are relatively articulate about their problems, Persephone, when we meet her, is a mess, sobbing uncontrollably for what at this early point in the story is her undisclosed plight.
The subsequent scene is straight out of the Theater of the Absurd, and takes place in a café where an officious domineering waiter (a hilariously spot-on Jeffrey Johnson, playing all the male characters) manipulates the seating, snatches away newspapers and flowers, and ignores female customers’ orders, serving cake when bread has been asked for and tea when the request is for hot chocolate. He gets his comeuppance, however, when the Furies (Anna Giannotis, Denise Scheerer and Denise Leitner) who have been nesting along the walls, converge on him, strip off his garments and re-garb him in a shorts-less, pants-less getup, transforming him and his hitherto bossy maleness into a ludicrous target for ridicule.
Both the Furies and Johnson in various guises reappear throughout, the former as a not entirely lucid chorus — providing a modicum of succor as the women’s various predicaments are enacted — and Johnson (always pitch-perfect) as whatever oaf the scenario calls for. These include Francine’s husband and smug colleague, Carl; Lillian’s Victorian spouse Franklin (who makes Ibsen’s Torvald seem enlightened); and Persephone’s husband Pluto, who clomps around in a mid-thigh tunic, brandishing his big staff and issuing orders in a booming voice that barely masks the infantile angst inside.
Something of a hodgepodge (as if the playwright purposefully aimed to touch on a variety of concerns for women), the narrative embraces scenes in breast cancer clinics and the administration of mammograms to all three pivotal characters, including (somewhat confusingly) Persephone, who is destined to remain immortal as long as she returns to Pluto. This confusion (mine, anyway) is compounded by the mantra she repeats to herself at various times from the beginning of the play, “No surgery. No chemo. No cutting. No poison.” as if, in fact, she’d already been given a distressing diagnosis.
But whatever puzzlements are generated by the plot, the overarching theme — women’s complicity in their own oppression, their inability to walk away from toxic situations even when they know they are toxic — lands with bracing impact and not a little humor. Before the play begins, it’s there already, embedded in the telling one-word title, Sorry — which is the fallback response for the “nice” woman or girl who’s been told she’s in the wrong but is afraid to mount a challenge. (As the narrative moves forward, and the characters gain self-awareness, the word becomes — hearteningly —more difficult for them to pronounce.)
On the small proscenium, scenic designer Justin Huen keeps the set simple, with light-colored walls and a floor that look faintly marbleized to suggest the ancient Greek motifs embedded in the story. Knee-high light fixtures like oversized lanterns (lighting design by Brandon Baruch) glower red in select scenes, with amber shadows sometimes streaking the darkness.
Sound by Joseph “Sloe” Slawinski is striking and omnipresent, almost a character itself — at times rising to a cacophonous pitch, as when it aids in the depiction of the sharp-tongued Francine’s inner fury, or elsewhere promoting a chortle, as in the mammogram scene, where it underscores with droll wit (insofar as a sound effect can be witty) the unpleasant experience of a humungous machine pressing against a tender breast.
As the prickly take-no-prisoners Francine, the dynamic Wright delivers every ounce the same high caliber performance that she’s gifted LA theatergoers with for decades. Floden serves up a soft and lovely contrast as a conventional woman from Victorian times, subject to her husband’s rule. As Persephone, Randel gradually comes into her own as the play (which needs pruning) builds to its climax. Johnson, with his array of macho buffoons, serves up a steady stream of laughs in an interesting piece whose theme isn’t funny at all.
Moving Arts Theatre, 3191 Casitas Ave., Atwater. Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 4 pm; No performances Sat. June 28 & Fri. July 4; thru July 19. https://movingarts.ludus.com/index.php Runnig time: approximately two hours and 15 minutes with an intermission.
