Theatre in Review: The Waterfall (Women's Project Theater)

	Patrice Johnson Chevannes, Natalie Paul. Photo: Joan Marcus

Two-handers are tricky things; unless the playwright finds the right balance of power between both characters, the entire enterprise will be seriously out of whack. That's the problem with The Waterfall, a mother-and-daughter matchup that is anything but a contest of equals. Indeed, it is barely a contest at all. Phanesia Pharel's play begins with Emi, a Haitian widow living on Florida's eastern coast, reaching out for her daughter Bean, who declines to be embraced. It is a graceless gesture on the younger woman's part, yet, by the finale, I thoroughly understood her resentment. In The Waterfall (a co-production with the company Thrown Stone), Bean can't catch a break.

At 64, Emi is one of those terrifying, fiercely life-grabbing figures, more often found in films and plays than in real life; a vigorous matriarch, undimmed by age, she can't stop showering Bean with critical opinions. "Everything your therapist says, Oprah has said it better," she tells Bean, who is going through a rough patch. She scorns Bean's life in Miami, a city, she says, that "is for gangsters, prostitutes, and Cubans." The survivor of a sometimes-difficult marriage, she is now dating her neighbor, never mind that he is dealing with cancer. ("Our connection cannot be defined," she says, teasingly.) Bean, whose own relationship is headed for the rocks, isn't amused.

Speaking of health issues, Emi is allegedly suffering from diabetes, but don't you believe it; she has the energy of ten women. She's also a practical jokester: When Bean comes to pick her up after a hospital stay, Emi carefully arranges herself in a wheelchair, doing her best imitation of a woman in a coma. She is also prone to sniffing Bean's crotch, announcing, "A lady should never have sex in the morning." Disapproving of her daughter living with her boyfriend, she adds a warning that I thought went out with my mother's generation: "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?"

Some of this is funny, some of it is grating, and all of it is impossible to ignore. Emi also has her Mother Courage side, too, having survived bloodshed in Haiti, which explains her lack of nostalgia for her home country. ("You could return," Bean says. "Some parts are safe," a comment that gets an icy response.) Despite her many laugh lines, Emi is demanding, exacting, and a bit of a bully. It's not entirely good news that Patrice Johnson Chevannes has been encouraged or allowed by the director, Taylor Reynolds, to play Emi with the cackling, wisecracking, arm-waving zeal of a 1970s-era sitcom character. In any case, Emi sucks up all the oxygen in the room, refusing to cede focus for a second to her troubled, unhappy daughter.

This is a problem because The Waterfall turns on the fact that Bean, at 34, is sailing into a crisis. A rising attorney bucking for a promotion, cohabiting with her intended husband Richard (about whom we learn disconcertingly little), she is living the dream. Unfortunately, the dream is Emi's. "Partner, wedding, baby -- that's my order," Bean tells her mother. "It's actually the order you taught me."

But when her firm at long last elevates her to partnership, Bean feels nothing. Soon, she gives voice to the unsayable, admitting that she doesn't want children, a proposition that horrifies Emi, who is living to become a grandmother. Then Bean takes action, making a decision that is all but guaranteed to terminate her relationship with Richard and set her on a collision course with her mother.

You'd think that a play with such a clear conflict would generate plenty of crackle, but the contrast between the characters is too stark for real engagement. Compared to Emi's nonstop fireworks display of emotions, Bean is largely depicted in shades of gray. She is defined only by what she doesn't want, a form of negative imaging that proves off-putting. "Real estate law is not my purpose," she laments. (Is it anyone's?) What she does want is, at best, murky. Poor Bean is not only defined almost entirely in opposition to her mother; she isn't a very interesting person. I don't think the playwright intends her to be passive and self-involved, but that is how she appears. It's a state of affairs that leaves Natalie Paul, her portrayer, with little or no room to maneuver.

The divide between Bean and Emi is so unbridgeable that Pharel's most imaginative device, the waterfall in Haiti where generations of women in Emi's family have gone to envision their futures, feels forced and too sentimentally folkloric. Bean doesn't need magical apparitions; she needs to grow up.

The production has other structural problems that Taylor hasn't been able to resolve, most notably the long pauses between scenes while the actors are offstage changing costumes. (Dina El-Aziz dresses the characters with a good appreciation of their different lifestyles.) Overall, The Waterfall moves slowly, repeatedly telegraphing Bean's ambivalence about her chosen path and letting Emi run on at length. The production design is solid: Teresa Williams' colorful set is filled with Haitian colors, which are sometimes matched in Venus Gulbranson's lighting. The sound design, by Kaileykielle Hoga and DJ Potts, is especially good at establishing locations; a late-in-the-show transition from Florida to Haiti, consisting of airplanes, local music, barking dogs, falling water, and birdsong, is especially gracefully done.

These effects cue a climax that places Bean at her ancestors' storied waterfall for an important reckoning. It's typical of the play, however, that, as the lights go down for the last time, we still have no idea of what she wants from life. --David Barbour