Four bodies, no weddings, and no funerals: why?

JULIA TIERNAN/YH Maria-Christina Oliveras, MC '01, and Meredith Summerville, ES '01, can't seem to connect, no matter how close to each other they get

Claire Chafee's Why We Have a Body is a tough nut to crack--it's an elusive, slippery script that offers few handholds for the unsuspecting viewer. Strictly speaking, it's the story of four women: a detective, a criminal, an explorer, and a paleontologist--or, a woman, her sister, her mother, and her lover. One might erroneously ass-
ume that because Why We Have a Body is a play about four women, three of them connected by blood and two of them by romance, it must undoubtedly offer up a rallying cry of sisterly connection in the face of adversity. One would be wrong.

Why We Have a Body certainly has its moments of coherence and association, but on the whole, it's not a very connected script. The production has some truly great moments, but with a script that offers up little more than a telling connection or clever passage here and there, stringing the moments together to form a cohesive whole is truly a challenge for its performers.

There's a discernible story at work here, but the play unfolds more meaningfully in psychological space than it does in physical time. At the center is Lili (Meredith Summerville, ES '01), a lesbian private investigator whose sister Mary (Lauren Popper, ES '01) robs 7-Elevens, sends telepathic faxes, and describes Sylvia Plath as one of the great comic minds of the 20th century. Lili just had a failed affair with Renee (Maria-Christina Oliveras, MC '01), a possibly heterosexual, divorced paleontologist who might be in love with Lili--or he might not be. Add to the picture Lili's mother Eleanor (Eileen Gibson, MC '00), who appears on a platform above the stage at sporadic moments wearing a pith helmet and riding in a canoe, or rolling up a sleeping bag, delivering detached meditations on the nature of womanhood.

It's an intriguing cast of characters, and each one offers up her own form of gender philosophy--from Eleanor's theory of the tripartate lesbian brain (a holy trinity of lust, memory, and hammering doubt) to Mary's hilarious celebrity dreams, involving everyone from Joan of Arc to Richard Gere, to Renee's recounting of a sexually charged experience in a supermarket full of women. These monologues are delivered with skillful timing, but Chafee's script offers little to link them together and as a result, the production seems more like a collection of ideas and observations than a meaningful narrative whole.

Director Michael Walker, DC '01, and his ensemble have made creative use of their space--a high-ceilinged room in the African-American Cultural Center--but like Chafee's script, it ultimately swallows them up. Grappling with such an anchorless work in such a hopelessly open area, you need real physical and verbal gravitas to give a production direction and focus. Of the four performers, Popper seems to grasp this principle most firmly--she commands the space around her, maintains seamless physical intensity, and breathes life into Chafee's fragmented speeches. Part of her success stems from the fact that Mary is undoubtedly the most compelling character of the four; perhaps because we're willing to forgive the disconnected logic of Chafee's script when her words are coming from the mouth of a legitimately insane character. We come to crave Mary's presence on stage to relieve the unconnecting weightiness of the majority of the scenes. She invites focus and connection from the audience because she shapes Chafee's free-associating monologues into contoured maps of meaning rather than laundry lists of underdeveloped images and observations. Popper is in control--even if her character is frantically grappling with her own sanity.

Summerville and Gibson seem to suffer the most from the opacity of Chafee's script, and the lack of definition in their characters is exacerbated by the shortcomings of their performance space. As a result of awkward staging and sentence swallowing, many of their lines are literally lost on the viewer. But it's a tough room to work in and there are some tough lines to deliver. I'm not sure how I myself would deliver such oblique phrases as "We are taught that we are an absence and mistake this for a longing to be found" and "Every woman is an incest survivor if you count the thoughts of the world, if those count." For what the script offers, all four actresses do an admirable job, and there are some truly poignant and funny moments. The problem is that even when the performers break through the script and connect with their characters, discovering and conveying sites of true human meaning, the script leaves them no-
where to go.

Why We Have a Body is a work defined by relationships--sister to sister, mother to daughter, lover to lover--but unfortunately, the audience understands too little about the true emotional character of these relationships for the bonds tying the four women together to carry sufficient meaning. As a result, the play is little more than a collection of individuals whose ties remain obscured, and no matter how successful the actresses are in discovering meaning within their individual characters, their connections remain a mystery.

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