Playwrights: Dorothy Milne, Clare Nolan, . Martie Sanders and Pamela Webster. At: The Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark
Phone: 773-868-4620; $20. Runs through: Nov. 18
'Can I just make up a word here?,' Sweat Girl Martie Sanders asks midway through her autobiographical monologue on trying to have a baby. Can she ever: 'Flabbergastation.' The word is the perfectly simple and completely complex punch line for a situation that's simultaneously hilarious and heart-tugging. It wouldn't do to reveal the context here so, suffice to say, Sanders' tale of a toe infection and an ER room doc reveal both the jaw-dropping depths of 'ignoramanicality' physicians are capable of and the need for an addition to the English language.
'Flabbergastation' is one of the many perfectly assembled words that propel Sweatily Ever After, the latest offering from the monologists collectively known as The Sweat Girls. The Girls ( the name is the result of a long-ago, late-night barroom confab ) have been performing for 14 years, spinning the days of their lives if not into gold, then certainly into ingeniously compelling stories threaded through with wisdom, humor and insight. There's an honesty to the Sweat Girls that eludes many another monologist: Let the Spalding Grays ( R.I.P. ) of the world spin stagecraft from swimming to Cambodia and other such wildly melodramatic stuff; the Sweat Girls lack all pretension as they illuminate the extraordinary within the usual and the profundity in the everyday.
Ever After finds the girls casting pages from their lives into a context of fairy-tale archetypes. Directed by Ann Boyd and written and performed by Sanders, Dorothy Milne, Clare Nolan and Pamela Webster, the collection of interlocking stories twirls around motifs of witches, princesses and universal yearnings.
Ever After doesn't break new ground: Maternity, men and the wonder and vulnerability of childhood are not new themes. But as mined by Sweat Girls, they gleam with bright clarity and brim with fearless authenticity. There's a contagious gusto to the production, a full-hearted rambunctious verve that comes from embracing life in all its exasperating, exhilarating messiness. The Girls pull the audience through raging traffic snarls and weeping, lonesome sorrows, from the roaring catharsis of adolescent howls to the suburban tragedy of the sorceress next door.
The last opens and closes Ever After, in Nolan's beguiling two-part tale of Hecate, the pastor's wife who made the irredeemable mistake of celebrating her witchhood during Sycamore's annual Pumpkin Fest Parade. Milne's devilish explications of her magical powers over angry motorists, feral animals and boys who might be vampires is equally enchanting as is Webster's evocation of the gales and gusts that defined key moments of her life. And then there's Sanders, part of the storied couple who longs for a child, but in a world where magic beans are hard to come by. It's a tale that leaves one primed for whatever comes after Ever After.