Nine women's comic quest to be amazin'

By Julie O'Connor

JOHN YI/YH To life, to life, l'chaim! L'chaim, l'chaim, to life!

At Mount Holyoke in the year 1972, Rita (Jessica Brickman, TD '02) declares, "When we're 30, we're going to be pretty amazing." But when she reunites with her old college friends at a restaurant six years later, "amazing" is still a work in progress. The performers enacting Wendy Wasserstein's, DRA '76 , Uncommon Wo-men and Others are similarly ambitious; what the cast does best is impart an enthusiastic spirit. A glass of wine all around, some boisterous memory-swapping, and suddenly we're back in a college dormitory watching the characters' younger selves spread marshmallow fluff on graham crackers and discuss boyfriends. Despite some over-embellishments of character, the actors are at least engaging in these flashback episodes. In general, the personalities of the play are appealing—we're curious enough to seek the stories behind the inside jokes that the women swat back and forth during the play's opening reunion scene.

From the onset, this nine-woman cast is faced with the difficulty of shouldering a script that, for all its animation, is brimming with more estrogen than Ally McBeal on a tearful tirade. As a graduate of Mount Holyoke herself, Wasserstein probably extracts much of the material from her own experiences living on an all-female campus. However, at times her dialogue seems overly laden with menstrual jokes, tampon talk, and debates over diaphragms. While many of the quips can be somewhat humorous, particularly the blunt pronouncements of Rita's character, which consistently elicit an "Oh, gross me out!" from her unfortunate listeners, they also spill over into redundancy and predictability. These characters don't deserve to be lumped into "girl-talk" clichés any more than to be championed as slogans of the feminist movement.

In the face of such societal typecasts and "uncommon women expectations," which vaguely instruct them to "go where no one else will go—do what no one else will do!" the eight students manage their world of expanding possibilities with both giggles and gravity. Yet, as aspiring lawyer Kate (Laurel Pinson, DC '02) remarks wistfully to her friend Carter (Emily Lodish, TD '03), "Just once it would be nice to wake up with nothing to prove."

Against stereotypical exaggerations of the other personalities, like the overly-annoying, chirpy Suzy Friend (Betty Wolf, BR '02), both Kate and Carter are refreshingly low-key and realistic. In one memorable scene, Kate (Pinson) flops down on the couch with an imposing-looking textbook. After a minute, her eyebrows rise above the book and she peers about cautiously. Confident that she is alone, she tosses the textbook aside and whips out a thick romance novel. Pinson's wide, mischievous grin and voice inflections win laughs as she flips the pages with delectable gusto.

Lodish can be amusing as well in the character of Carter, the eccentric-genius type. Although she has few lines, Lodish communicates with us through moments of miming, which are executed with style. Carter practices for her typing test by synchronizing the click-clack of her letters to the orchestral rendition of the "Hallelujah chorus" that plays on a record. "I need 50 words per minute to get a good job when I get out of here," she explains to an amused Kate, who walks into the room mid-performance. This line also serves to indicate the vastly different working world that greeted women college graduates of the '70s.

Marta Castaing, PC '02, also exhibits skillfully-executed mannerisms in her role of eccentric headmistress Mrs. Plumm. Her light-blue sweater fastened neatly over her shoulders at the top button, Castaimg clasps her hands together pleasantly and smiles, pouring tea and telling rifle stories with a dainty charm. At intervals during the play, Mrs. Plumm is spotlighted on a platform above the stage scene, where the audience can watch both her speeches and the reactions of her students sitting on the stage below, an innovative choice in direction.

After getting to know these characters through their vignettes of recalled memories, the audience is eventually returned to the more present-day restaurant reunion, where we still find confusion and unfulfillment. The conflict continues to center around the characters' desire to prove their worth to themselves and to each other. Yet besides the uncertainty that still trails these women in their quests for happiness, and the play's weaker margins of predictable dialogue and mild overacting, there's potential for both actors and characters here. As the tenacious Rita puts it to her friends once again, "When we're 45 we're gonna be pretty fucking incredible."

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