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Masthead
A CurtainUp Review
Lost Girls
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I know we'll never be friends, Maggie. But we can be civil.
You have a daughter and I have a step-daughter who is in the
middle of some serious life business and we should all make
the decision to be on the same team. Especially around the
holidays, which are tough on everyone. — Penny Life is so much easier when you're an idiot. — Maggie |
L-R) Tasha Lawrence, Meghann Fahy, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Piper Perabo (Photo: Joan Marcus)
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At the heart of Pollono's new and intriguing play, as it in Thurbers plays, is the steady decline and decimation of the working class in rural New England and specifically its impact on a family of three contentious, strong-willed women. Whereas Thurber's milieu was Western Massachusetts, Pollono has set his play in Manchester, New Hampshire where, not unexpectedly, the prospects of getting out of the economic rut for the poorest of the working class is just as prevalent.
In Lost Girls we get a clear and cold vision of life for the three women who appear as unredeemable from their social situation, as they are irretrievable from a generational cycle of misguided behavior that includes pregnancy in their teens. It is a life style that we see as pervasively entrenched and repetitive despite back stories brought to the fore by the prospect of change.
Although we only get a glimpse of snow falling outside a modest rental home in Manchester, New Hampshire, a ferocious Nor'easter is in the works and already making the local roads hazardous. Yet thirty-something Maggie (Piper Perabo) can't imagine that she will not be able to drive to her job as a salesperson at a nearby Bloomingdale outlet. She therefore makes preparations to leave.
The first problem she encounters is that her car is gone. Following a cascade of expletives that might make David Mamet cringe, Maggie awakens her equally foul-mouthed, stay-at-home mother Linda (Tasha Lawrence) with whom she lives along with her sixteen year-old daughter Erica. Frantic that she might lose the one job that pays the rent and that keeps them eating, she enlists the help of state trooper Lou (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) who happens to be her ex.
Rage turns to desperation when Maggie and Lou find out that Erica did not show up at school that morning. She has obviously run away, an act that we quickly learn is apparently not an unfamiliar one among the young women in this household. To complicate the tension that already exists between Maggie and Lou, he has brought along Penny (Meghann Fahy,) the woman he married two years ago. Penny's apparently sincere display of sweetness is as discomforting to Maggie and Linda as is her undaunted support for Lou who happens to be a recovering alcoholic.
The scene shifts smoothly to a motel room where a girl (Lizzy Declement) and a boy (Josh Green) with whom she goes to school have checked in when the driving became unmanageable. Although the boy admits to having had a crush on her since the second grade, he has dutifully agreed to drive her to Florida where she is presumably hooking up with a guy who is decades older and with whom she was having a secret affair right under the nose of her mother. That is all the plot you need to know in a story of people whose lives remain rooted in the kind of vicious cycle that is more than likely to become and remain more of the same.
While it has become a kind of tradition for the women in this family to get pregnant in their teens, it is even more traditional to rely on the fierceness of their hardened personalities to survive. Pollono doesn't curtail the use of expletives as it so perfectly defines these minimally educated people.
The actors, under the fine direction of Jo Bonney (she also directed Small Engine Repair at this theater) are skilled at deploying New England-speak as they convey their character's determination to get at least one step beyond where each had been. It is funny to hear how proud they are that the women in their family have been slowly making progress by getting pregnant a little later than had great grandma at fifteen, then Linda at then sixteen, and Maggie at seventeen.
Perabo presides ferociously throughout the play as the hard-edged Maggie, whose vulnerability, nevertheless is tested by Lou's appearance. Moss-Bachrach creates an interesting figure. He's a man formerly embattled by demons who has been redeemed by his job and second chance at marriage. Also giving spot-on performances are Lawrence, as the slovenly play-it-as-it-lays Linda, Fahy, as the too-empathetic-to-be-real Penny, and a very pretty Declement as the rebellious Girl. Green is making an impressive New York s stage debut as the Boy. Set designer Richard Hoover has given a funky retro look to the interior which serves the aggressively regressive niche into which its inhabitants have fallen.
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Lost Girls by John Pollono Directed by Jo Bonney Cast: Piper Perabo (Maggie),Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Lou), Meghann Fahy (Penny), Tasha Lawrence (Linda), Lizzy DeClement (Girl), Josh Green (Boy) Set: Richard Hoover Costumes: Theresa Squire Lights: Lap Chi Chu Sound & Original Music: Daniel Kluger Running Time: 1 hour and 20 minutes without Intermission MCC Lortel Theaterwww.mcctheater.org From 10/21/15; opening 11/09/15; closing 12/04/15. Reviewed by Simon Saltzman at 11/08 press preview |
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