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A Family of Women

nytheatre.com review by Sharon Fogarty
August 15, 2005

Congratulations to this fine cast and playwright of A Family of Women for taking possibly the world’s most difficult issues and displaying them vulnerably, without theatrical anesthesia. I am still recovering.Imagine The Triplets of Belleville on acid: sweet, soft women in print dresses pouring cup after cup of tea, eating stale cake, completely grief stricken. In fact, there is hardly a break in their misery. Writer/director Karlton Parris’s work is daring in that it begs us to ride this barely tolerable tide of pain.The play features five women, all played a bit humbly by talented actresses who may have been a bit under-directed. Set in 1950 at a birthday party for Mum, played brilliantly by Margaret Boschi—though some of her best moments were played facing upstage—who has the difficult task of flying from senile tangents to lucid words of wisdom: harpooning truisms upon her daughters in denial. Boschi’s character is really at the helm of the play. “One day I’ll go wondering off inside this silly mind and I’ll never come back” aptly describes the pace of this piece.Wendy Laurence James modestly portrays Mum’s daughter Silvie with the blind hysteria of a woman who has tragically lost all those who need her. The visiting sisters are Vivian, well performed by Virginia Miller with the desperate chic of a woman escaping her past; Doreen, a welcome presence to the stage played with comic down-to-earthness by actress Helen Gresty; and finally Violet whose flight from the family seems the most extreme, here played by Ali Townsend, an attractive woman who manages the grotesque expressions of her self-loathing character.In 90 minutes time, the characters reveal their darkest secrets and the stories become almost macabre, with graphic descriptions of an abortion, a few horrid deaths, perpetual sobbing and, as the lights fade, an acceptance into an inevitable purgatory.I wanted the more heartrending bits to be isolated so that I could grasp them properly, but they're pureed together as though for a feeding tube. The show needs layers of presentation, adjustments in timing, or perhaps lighting or stage pictures to further define the play’s more profound moments.