Playwright: Wendy Kesselman
At: Wing & Groove Theatre,
1935-1/2 W. North Ave.
Phone: (773) 782-9417; $18
Runs through: May 31
This one-act by Wendy Kesselman would seem to have it all: incest, lesbianism, France, bitchiness taken to extremes, and yes, murder … bloody, out-of-control, passionate murder. Yet it’s odd that Wing & Groove’s latest production, and Kesselman’s play, both have about them such an air of restraint. Based on a true crime (once dubbed the ‘crime of the century’ by today’s standards, it looks almost wholesome) that occurred in suburban France in the early 1930s, our story takes us into the lives of four women, all of whom need to get out more. Christine (Autumn Lakosky-Drexler) and Lea (Molly Meehan, with a face that recalls the goofy innocence of a young Sandy Dennis) are sisters whose offstage mother profits from selling them into a kind of slavery: that of housemaids. The two sisters, Christine, the older and more controlling of the pair, and Lea, the dependent and worshipping younger sibling, live far too much in a world populated by two. They sleep together. They work together. When out of their mistress’s sight for a moment, they giggle together. It could drive a girl insane. Kesselman brings their closeness to life and provides us with the impetus, if not the psychological veracity, for the pair becoming lovers. They work in the household of a penny-pinching, anal-retentive matron (Christy Arrington, in an overly mannered performance) who delights in discovering the household faux pas of her employees. Watch as she snaps on her white gloves and checks for dust between underneath the newel post of the staircase. Stare in amazement as she throws a hissy fit when Lea dares to appear in a cardigan over her uniform. The matron’s daughter (Jessica Luukonen) treats the maids like pets, teasing them with a smile, and then pulling back the proffered kindness with a smirk of cruel adolescent delight.
Director Bryan White has chosen to stage this claustrophobic environment with mannered taste, forgetting completely about ratcheting up the tension that might lead one to the ultimate in violence. Thus, we see the murders that cap the play as the result more of an accumulation of minor household disasters (a power outage caused by a faulty iron, the same faulty iron singeing a chemise, a candy wrapper on the floor) rather than as the result of social inequality and the shamed discovery of the maids’ incestuous relationship.
Wing and Groove has a mostly able ensemble here, and has made a good effort at trying to work beyond their storefront means, but they don’t quite hit the suspense or political ramifications in the subtext of Kesselman’s play and the result is a bore. Add to this that the Wing and Groove space (at least on the night I was there) was heated to an uncomfortable level, and the short piece becomes nearly soporific, rather than horrific.