Playwright: adapted by Frances Limoncelli from the novella by Rachel Ingalls. At: Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood. Phone: 773-761-4477; $30. Runs through: March 28
Rachel Ingalls wrote her novella in 1983, but its universe invokes the Feminine Mystique era, when the duties of an affluent California housewife like our Dorothy were focused almost exclusively on keeping her all-white house spotless, ignoring her husband's frequent absences, and brooding over her own unworthiness at fulfilling these domestic tasks. Add in the self-accusatory pressures arising from her two children dying untimely, and who can blame our heroine for conjuring herself a fantasy consort possessing all the virtues of son, lover, servant and companion? Especially a noble savage physically manifested as an amphibious green-skinned ( but oh-so-virile ) sea-creature, as unlike any flawed mortal male as a lonely matron could wish?
There's no denying the fairy-tale romance of Ingalls' Beauty-and-the-Beast story: expository information is conveniently blurred by an elliptical narrative minimalism ( ironically, enabling us to anticipate the final revelation too soon ) , while the nuts-and-bolts details of interspecies sex—anatomical descriptions and grooming habits, for example—are largely left to our imaginations. But anthropomorphic erotica does not translate easily to the stage, where flesh-and-blood actors replicating fanciful events in real time demand a degree, however slight, of literal representation. Given the fuzziness of the source material, Frances Limoncelli's adaptation can hardly be blamed for emerging likewise enigmatic as regards both internal and external action ( as when Dorothy proposes restoring her alien visitor to his birth-home in the Gulf of Mexico by motoring down the Pacific coastline past border checkpoints to the Panama canal—is she unaware that the targeted body of water also abuts the easily accessed south coast of the United States? ) .
The charismatic Brenda Barrie, in the role of the virginal Dorothy, delivers a performance going a long way toward enlisting our sympathy, as do the always-watchable Peter Greenberg as the primordial paragon and Jennifer Tyler as Dorothy's bitchy sidekick. So does Josh Horvath's original score of cello-heavy mysteries-of-the-deep incidental music and Julia Neary's delicately sensual choreography, under the direction of magic-realism maestra Ann Boyd. Despite the quality and care invested in this effort, however, one cannot help but question Lifeline Theatre's judgment in selecting to augment its repertoire with this soapsudsy yarn recalling "women's fiction" from a less enlightened age.
