Women of the plains gather
"Many plays -- certainly mine -- are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them." Thornton Wilder's comment is both disingenuous and true, and the same artful simplicity that marks "Our Town" also infuses the Road Theatre Company’s "The Friendly Hour." Imagine "The View" meets Laura Ingalls Wilder: Tom Jacobson's all-female elegy to life in rural South Dakota is based on the actual minutes of a woman's club that met from 1934 through 2007.
Half a dozen dirt-poor Depression newlyweds, led by freethinking Dorcas Briggle (Ann Noble) and flinty Effie Voss (Kate Mines), decide to meet monthly for games, discussion and tasty lunches. Jacobson doesn't so much narrate as eavesdrop on these women as they pass through familiar milestones of everyday life: pregnancy, marriage, aging, disappointment. Events are small-scale here, so what registers most vividly in Mark Bringelson's intimate and tender production is time itself -- mortality, the seasons, being part of nature's cycle. Over and over, the club wonders about God and the eternal, meanwhile skinning skunks for a quarter or suffering from hemorrhoids.
What might feel prosaic -- and yes, I found myself drifting now and again -- is enhanced by design and performance. Desma Murphy's "unfinished" wood-beamed set is graceful and durable, much like the women it shelters (although it doesn't evoke the harshly beautiful landscape that dominates their lives). The fine ensemble resists the urge to comment on their characters, and, as a God-fearing conservative, Mines gives a standout performance. Her Effie was so credible, I was dying to ask what she thought of Sarah Palin.
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Charlotte Stoudt
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