Theatre in Review: A Woman Among Women (LCT3)

	Zoe Geltman, Dee Pelletier. Photo: Maria Baranova

In A Woman Among Women, tragedy unfolds in a backyard with a clockwork precision not seen since...well, since Arthur Miller turned off his typewriter. There's a reason for that.

The backyard, in Northampton, Massachusetts, belongs to Cleo, a therapist who founded (and continues to run) a psychological wellness center for women. She lives with her friend, Tina, and her daughter, Grace, who is also employed at the center. Offstage, but casting an enormous shadow, is Jo, Cleo's other daughter, who has a lengthy rap sheet of bad behavior; she is currently in jail for assault (her victim can no longer walk) and also defacing an elementary school with images of penises.

As it happens, Jo's case isn't as open-and-shut as it seems. Tina and Sarah (Cleo's neighbor and colleague), working to exonerate her, think they have found evidence that Jo wasn't taking the lithium needed to keep her behaving reasonably constructively. Cleo, scarred by the memory of her late husband, an abusive drunk, and weary of paying lawyers to keep Jo out of trouble, has zero interest in pursuing the issue. The same goes for Roy, Jo's husband, who wants to be left alone and raise his daughter in peace. But soon, Grace -- who goes back and forth about taking Roy as her lover -- is asking questions about Jo's prescriptions, igniting a debate about individual responsibility and professional malpractice. Once again, a family too often mired in scandal is facing the threat of exposure and ruin.

If all this sounds familiar, it's because, as playwright Julia May Jonas freely admits, A Woman Among Women is her feminized take on All My Sons. Talk about the anxiety of influence: Miller freely admitted to taking Henrik Ibsen as a role model, to the point of offering his own version of An Enemy of the People. (Indeed, some of his critics felt that his Ibsen worship contributed to his work's sometimes stolid, finger-pointing qualities.) Now comes Jonas, who carries on the tradition, with a twist. A Woman Among Women is part of her ALTAS cycle, an acronym for "all long true American stories." In these works, we are told, "She reimagines canonical 20th-century American male-experience plays as they'd be experienced by other people, mostly women."

Whether you see this as a brave and enlightening experiment or yet another journey into the center of the American theatre's vast echo chamber will depend on your individual taste. The way Miller has become a bee in the collective bonnet of female American playwrights is worth contemplating: See the many commentaries on The Crucible, most of them dedicated to proving that Abigail Williams, Miller's villain, is the victim of a frame-up. Whatever you think of him, Miller was concerned with the vital questions of his day, producing a handful of works that continue to resonate. I wish more writers would imitate him instead of obsessively trying to revise, reimagine, reconstruct, or deconstruct his oeuvre. There are many more interesting subjects.

I might not feel this way if A Woman Among Women had a solid identity of its own. But the script wanders all over the map. The central, Miller- and Ibsen-like, moral reckoning is offset by giggly comedy bits. Roy, trying to pull out a crucial piece of evidence about Jo, gets tangled up in resetting his smartphone password; a revelatory moment gets pre-empted by a comedy routine. Grace, who initially comes across as a moonstruck teenager rather than a thirtyish medical professional, throws herself at Roy. "When I get close to him, my body plumps up with fluid," she says. (With dialogue like that, Zoe Geltman is working without a net.) But she backs off in a panic when he returns her feelings. ("You gave me a boner yesterday," he says, offering his version of sweet nothings.) There are several musical interludes, including one involving audience participation. As for the two sequences featuring the cast dressed up in pioneer outfits, evoking a family who, a century earlier, died en masse, of tuberculosis: you're on your own. I haven't a clue.

Adding to the weirdly uncertain atmosphere is some of the strangest, most maladroit dialogue to come our way in some time. "When you come out here, can you not leave the trash in the doorway?" says Tina. "Because then I walk out into the world through a threshold of trash, which it is not difficult to see is a terrible way to enter the world." (We can admire the sentiment, if not the syntax.) Recalling the early days of his marriage, Roy says, "That house was a piece of shit. Jo'd be blowin' me, and I'd be watching termites destroyin' the corners of the room." There's nothing like termites to distract a guy, is there? Grace, fed up with family matters, announces. "Let's just stop with the Jo talk, okay? We're like anorexics who can't stop baking." I'm still figuring that one out.

Among the cast members, Dee Pelletier goes a long way toward anchoring the action as Cloe, whose motivations seem increasingly mixed as the evening wears on. Given some of the heftiest chunks of dialogue, Tina Chilip acquits herself well as Tina. The characters can't stop commenting about Roy's hotness to his face, which, I suppose, is fair enough, given Jonas' reverse-engineered gender vision. But the slim, clean-cut Gabriel Brown is awfully hard to credit as the formerly pierced, fishnet-wearing bad boy, whom, we are repeatedly told, has beefed himself up.

Sarah Cameron Hughes' production preserves a sense of intimacy, which is probably the right way of handling this material. (This is true even if the cast seems ill at ease playing characters given to relentlessly voicing their inner thoughts.) Thus, Brittany Vasta's set design removes the stage of the Claire Tow Theater, wrapping the audience around the action. Jonas mentions in her script notes that she is suspicious of too many light cues, so Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew obliges her. Wendy Yang's costumes and Kate Marvin's sound are both solid contributions.

Of course, authors only write what they can, and if Jonas wants to engage in dialogue with the great names of the past, so be it. (Her novel, Vladimir, adapted to a streaming series, apparently owes an enormous debt to Vladimir Nabokov.) But surrounded by a universe of subjects, it's a pity that so many current playwrights and directors are only interested in remodeling the works of their predecessors. The bumper crop of plays about plays is becoming tiresome. Really, there's so much more to talk about. --David Barbour