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-- Carol Lloyd
The War at Home
Bold Girls. By Rona Munro. Directed by Naomi Gibson. Starring Frances Ferry, Janet Ward, Patricia Miller, and Gabrielle Breathnach. Presented by the Viaduct Theater Company at Kate O'Brien's, 579 Howard, through May 31. Call (510) 540-5554.
The Belfast kitchen setting of the first scene of Bold Girls has a working kettle for tea and a supply of potatoes and sandwich meat that gets chopped and eaten during the show. Plastic dinosaurs on the floor (evidence of kids) and real Irish programs on a black-and-white TV also spoil any pretensions to Irish nostalgia or romance you might have hoped for walking into the theater. Later the four women go to a pub and listen to Diana Ross.
Realism goes in and out of style on the stage, but I love this kind of thing. When it's done well it can evoke a feeling better than most expressionism or fantasy. The feeling here is futility, jadedness, sadness; the four women live not just in a domestic mire but also in a war zone. They gossip and smoke and peer out the window whenever something explodes. Marie's husband was killed by the British, and her fond memories of him become the play's dramatic focus. Nora is her nervous, sweater-wearing neighbor; and Cassie, Nora's daughter, is a brash 35-year-old who wears black heels, a camouflage tank top, and a skirt, with stacked dark hair and thick makeup. She has a history with Marie's husband that gradually -- too gradually -- gets revealed; and during a skirmish outside a mysterious girl named Deirdre knocks and asks for shelter. She turns out to be an illegitimate, um, relative of Marie's husband.
The story is long and involved, and the revelations in the second act drag; but watching the relationships unfold among the three main women is enthralling. Frances Ferry has a talent for bile that flourishes in Cassie's monologues -- "I've had men tell me I was an angel come down from heaven to save 'em from a sea of whiskey," she says, with an ironic twist in her mouth. "Hounds, every last one of 'em." And Patricia Miller does a near-seamless job as a kind but sharp-tongued widow. But the script also drives each woman to some kind of emotional extreme, and each actor winds up overacting in her own direction. A military raid on the pub that involves a lot of yelling, body contortions, and flashing lights is a good example because it tries to evoke horror and confusion in a half-expressionistic way; it fails because the rest of the play's realism is so convincing. The show is funny and strong when the women are simply themselves.
Rona Munro wrote Bold Girls when a theater in Scotland asked her to come up with "a play about women's lives in the north of Ireland." That assignment may account for both the realism and the strain in the script, because Munro apparently doesn't live in Belfast and had to do conscious research for the play. But she points out in the program that Belfast has already changed since the show was first put on in 1991; like all war zones it's a transient place, and transience may be the best reason to make and see realistic works of art.
-- Michael Scott Moore
