Rebekah Walendzak, Audrey Flegel and Sienna Harris ( from left ) in Sunday on the Rocks. Photo by David Zak
Playwright: Theresa Rebeck
At: Bailiwick Repertory Theatre's
Second Sex series at the
Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont
Phone: 773-883-1090; $20-$25
Runs through: Feb. 10
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
The formula for writing a play of this genre is to: 1 ) assemble a group of personalities guaranteed to annoy one another, 2 ) put them together in one room, 3 ) contrive to have them lose their inhibitions/manners, 4 ) keep them from leaving and then 5 ) try to wrap up the lesson plan when the therapy sessionoops, human conflicthas run its course.
Playwright Theresa Rebeck presents us with four unmarried ladies, tidily distinguished by their sexual proclivities: Jen sleeps around, Jessica claims to be chaste, Gayle doesn't have a boyfriend and Elly has just discovered she's pregnant. A lack of affordable housing in their rural Massachusetts town explains how thirtysomething career women of widely diverse occupations and lifestyles come to cohabit in fashionably-decorated domesticity. Elly is starting off her morning with a fifth of Dewar's. Soon, Gayle and Jen have been persuaded to join her in drinking and kvetching about men, sex, God, the absent Jessica, men, their moms, confessions of youthful indiscretions, abortions vs. hiring out as a surrogate carrier ( but not more effective methods of contraception ) , men, Ouija board games and the compulsion to bake cookies when inebriated.
But Rebeck's depiction of her personnel as sorority girls at a slumber party ( the rational Jessica standing in for housemother ) appear to be her sole means of preventing these distressed damsels from going awayfor a walk, to take out the trash, up to their rooms, for chrissakeswhen the fur begins to fly. And her means of spurring them to permanently alter the status quoor consider doing so, anywayis to introduce a creepy crime-show complication so hackneyed as to make us suspect a red herring even before our guess is revealed to be accurate ( a reversal barely acknowledged by the characters involved ) .
Presented as part of Bailiwick Repertory Theatre's "Second Sex" series ( the title, a reference to Simone de Beauvoir's feminist manifesto, though one wonders what its namesake would think of Rebeck's portrait of les femmes as shrill, irresponsible, infantile whiners ) , Sunday On The Rocks provides a vehicle for four capable young actresses under the direction of multiple award-winning sound designer Victoria DeIorio ( who also supplies the superlative incidental music ) . But no matter how they may strive to invoke the harmonies of cozy cat-chat, the agenda in Rebeck's 100-minute-long, no-intermission symposium still disrupts any enjoyment or enlightenment it may offer.