April 15--A woman sits in the waiting room of an obstetrician's office, while her female partner is in another room being inseminated, and a young couple nearby can't help but tell her how brave she is. For what, she asks? "Trying to be a normal family," comes the well-intentioned if screwy reply. "Good for you!"
And yet the nuances of same-sex coupledom (and the desire to have a baby) in the small Missouri town of writer-director Felicia Basanavicius' play, the debut production from a new company called Reutan Collective, are only sketchily outlined here, reduced to concerns about custody should the birth mother ever die.
This what-if becomes the linchpin of a confusing narrative centering on two women who don't seem particularly suited for each other (they are either tense or bickering in every scene), let alone capable of raising a child together. Does either even work for a living? Do they have any outside interests or goals beyond being a couple and having a baby? Who knows. Nor is there a single conversation about whose sperm they will use, be it anonymous donor or that of someone they know.
It's not even clear until the very end when this story is supposed to take place, which is important when you're talking about the legal rights of gay and lesbian couples.
Jensen, played by Emilie Modaff, is seemingly the more relaxed of the two, whereas Wit (Sarah Nutt), who has both an overbearing mother and sister to contend with, is wound tight from the start. But, as characters, they are too indistinct to work as anything but place holders. Who they are, both as individuals and a couple, never takes shape.
You keep waiting for things to snap into place, but they only get murkier as the story progresses, with unexplained interludes "hosted" by a beer-drinking bearded sage, of sorts, who breaks the fourth wall to instruct the audience on his rules for living. I have no idea what his presence (clunky in its execution) has to do with Jensen and Wit's story, which itself is overly complicated and filled with half-details about their past that need more clarification to justify their inclusion. The script just isn't a solidly told story quite yet.
What the production does have going for it are two very strong performances by Rainee Denham as Wit's elegantly meddlesome mother, who is trying to remedy past mistakes and wants the best for her kid, and Bethany Elfrink as Wit's sister, a bull in a china shop that Elfrink plays at top volume, pedal to the metal. It is a lot of performance from Elfrink, and yet every time she barrels into a scene, it works like gangbusters.
2 STARS
When: Through April 28
Where: The Public House Theater, 3914 N. Clark St.
Tickets: $10 at 800-650-6449 or www.pubhousetheatre.com
nmetz@tribpub.com
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