Playwright: Jerre Dye. At: Strawdog Theatre Company at the Factory Theater, 1623 W. Howard St. Tickets: $30. Runs through: Oct. 1
Current audience demographics have spawned a glut of dramas revolving around middle-aged family members endowed by scriptwriters with fully-developed personalities struggling to resolve the problems engendered by their very young and/or very old kine.g., children born with physical/mental impairments, elders losing control of their facilitieswhom the aforementioned authors present as near-inanimate encumbrances, existing solely to promote anguished discussion.
Initially, Jerre Dye's premise may appear typical of the genre: Mrs. Irene Radford suffers from memory loss, compelling her daughter, Mrs. Luvie Radford-Joyce, to hire home-care nurse Mrs. Dolly Danvers. In her lucid moments, Irene belittles Luvie mercilessly until the latter loses patience and replies in kind, only to castigate herself for her insensitivity. Dolly shrugs off the verbal abuse, being more concerned over her 26-year-old son, who still lives at home where he immerses himself in video games to escape the boredom of his dead-end job. Three generations of husbands having fled the neglect arising from the stress imposed on their wives, "Gaybird" hairdresser Leonard Mapes now represents the solitary male dwelling within this isolated circle.
Where Dye departs from popular agist tropes is in granting all of these individuals the opportunity to voice their opinion on a domestic crisis becoming increasingly common in our society. Through Irene's flashbacks to her own youth, we witness her dismay and resentment at being appointed nurse to her invalid mother by a father unwilling to involve himself in duties traditionally regarded as purely feminine province. Irene's anger at her own dependence is mirrored in Luvie, whose dejection over her own thwarted ambitions is unsuccessfully concealed behind a rote cheerfulness as absent of genuine communication as Dylan Danvers' one-way conversations with the television screen.
Dye is not content to abandon his characters to perpetuation of this gloomy scenario, though. Mother-daughter conflicts are substantially reduced after Luvie begins to affirm, rather than oppose or ignore, her mother's flights of fancy, while Dolly exhorts her offspring to leave the nest, lest he grow embittered over dreams deferred. The benefits of men sharing filial responsibilities are demonstrated, too, by Leonard's occupation of his late mother's beauty shop as a means of remaining close to her.
Optimism alone does not make for easy answers, of course, but director Erica Weiss and a cast inaugurating Strawdog Theatre Company's residency in Factory Theater's spiffy new ground-floor facility parses Dye's refreshingly intelligent dynamic with unhurried expertise to deliver performances reflecting humor, compassion and the most accurate and uncaricatured Tennessee dialects ( courtesy of Sammi Grant ) heard in this region for many a season.