Playwright: Joan MacLeod. At: Pegasus Players, 1145 W. Wilson. Phone: 773-878-9761; $17-$25. Runs through: April 12
We generally picture a schoolyard bully as a boy, but there are bully girls, too. This play—based on 1990's headline-making incidents in Vancouver, Canada—explores the psychology of girl-on-girl violence. However, author Joan MacLeod is too clever to portray the bully or her victim directly. Instead, this one-woman play goes after the girl who is friend to both and becomes the enabler of cruelty. By the end of the play, 15-year-old Braidie loathes what she has allowed to happen, but it's too late. It's fascinating, powerful, well-written material that demands an interpreter who is ingratiating, vulnerable, youthful and defensive. Under director Ilesa Duncan, Alice Wedoff creates just such a fully-dimensional character, a young woman who is infuriating and frightening.
Braidie's not into smoke, drink, drugs or even sex. So what's going on? Well, home is dysfunctional with a frequently absent father and a haranguing mother whom Braidie calls "the Voice of Mum." Understanding the family dysfunction would help us understand Braidie, but that's not the fish MacLeod fries. This one's not about family but about friends.
Braidie has grown up with Adrienne and Sophie and has come to follow and idolize the wilder ( smoke, drink, sex ) Adrienne, the alpha female. Sophie, for her part, has become the emotional punching bag for the others. Lacking gumption and seemingly devoid of personality ( as Braidie describes her ) , Sophie evidences a need to be punished by others as well as herself. Again, MacLeod isn't interested in why, only in the fact of it. Both Adrienne and Braidie are cruel to Sophie, but as Adrienne's violence turns physical, Braidie quite literally looks the other way. She is profound enough to wonder why it's all necessary—why Adrienne needs to hurt, why Sophie needs to be hurt and why she herself allows the hurt to happen when she might stop it. When Adrienne's violence finally goes too far, and a cloak of silence enshrouds the school, Braidie is left to ponder, "The friend I love is gone. All that's left is the shape of a girl."
That's a great deal of sobering material to pack into a 75-minute play, yet MacLeod's dialogue never smacks of having been written by an adult. Her ear for, and sense of, adolescent personality are utterly brilliant and darkly captivating. The wonder is that it also manages to be entertaining, especially in the convincing interpretation cooked up by Duncan and Wedoff.
The richly detailed setting by Richard and Jacqueline Penrod provides a sandy waterfront patch beneath a hulking, rotting pier. It's warm yet grotty and perhaps emblematic of the social rot the play reveals, but it nearly overwhelms. One wonders why Duncan felt the need for such nearly-life-sized massiveness.