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Theater: Half and Half
2006-06-14
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This article shared 3564 times since Wed Jun 14, 2006
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Playwright: James Sherman
At: Victory Gardens Theater, 2257 N. Lincoln
Contact: 773/871-3000; $35-$40
Runs through: July 9
BY CATEY SULLIVAN
If you grew up with a mother who began slipping the stories for Free Children pages of Ms. magazine into your lunchbox in the early 1970s and a father who thought Renee Richards ( the 1970s transgendered tennis champ, not the contemporary porn star ) was proof of the coming apocalypse, you may have a moment of disquieting recognition when the lights go up on Half and Half.
Ugly formica kitchen counters? Check. Silent father in a freakishly wide tie and polyester pants? Check. Robot-smiling mom squeezing fresh orange juice with disturbing aggression? Check.
I had the bad-flashback willies before the first word of dialogue was uttered in Jim Sherman's latest comedy.
There's plenty that's mediocre and simplistic about Half and Half, but for period-perfect detail, the thing captures that early-'70s sensibility spot on, right down to the box of Quisp cereal on the breakfast table. This is a gimmicky show, but for a generation coming of age with no clue ( God help us all ) about who Betty Friedan was, it's a valuable, easy-to-digest primer in how we've all come—and not come—a long way, baby.
Playwright James Sherman's first act gives us repressed wife and mother Susan Grant ( Laura T. Fischer, nicely showing us a Stepford veneer barely containing a woman on the verge of breaking through ) and her one-note chauvinist husband ( Joe Dempsey, as insufferable as they come ) . Teenage daughter Lucy ( Mattie Hawkinson ) falls somewhere between the two—embarrassed because mom's becoming a 'women's libber,' and excited by the idea of skipping school for a consciousness-raising protest.
The dialogue swirls around Mom's discovery of Betty Freidan, the galvanizing author who first identified the roiling unrest of millions of unfulfilled woman as 'the problem that has no name,' and Dad's pig-headed inability to realize that his wife has a name besides Mrs. Stewart Grant. ( Before Freidan, significant doses of Thorazine and/or Valium were society's primary response to women who questioned the limitations of their lives. ) In the second act, we see Lucy grows up to be a sharkish corporate lawyer, working on a case at the breakfast table while her stay-at-home husband whips up frittatas and her post-feminist daughter pleads for a nose job.
The parallels between acts are geometrically tidy, and the characters are as easy to read as neon billboards. At each breakfast discussion, we get a career revelation, a plate of eggs tossed into the garbage, a heated discussion about wanting more and a phone call from mom that ends in tears. As a drama, it's a bit of a bore.
Half and Half isn't excruciatingly bad. It's not one of those shows where 10 minutes in you want to start peeling off layers of your eyeball jelly, but it's not particularly smart. It's content to be sitcommish, innocuous, utterly forgettable and, in the end—unless you're clueless about the overtly Neanderthal attitudes that prevailed back before Nixon resigned—it's also a time-waster.
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This article shared 3564 times since Wed Jun 14, 2006
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