Playwright: Naomi Wallace
At: Thunder & Lightning Ensemble at Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland
Phone: 773-332-9939; $15
Runs through: July 22
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
Bad boys can eventually settle down to become good men ( in fiction, anyway ) , but the time hasn't come yet for bad-girl heroines to grow into good women. Bad girls can make good—e.g., George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren—so long as they are punished with loneliness or disillusionment. The most socially-approved course for bad girls, however, is early death.
So what makes Pace Chance, our teenage femme fatale, a bad girl? Well, to begin with, she's smart—not flirty smart, but school-science-fair smart. She's also bossy, tantalizing her younger boy toy with erotic games while refusing him outright sex. But what makes her a prime candidate for martyrdom is her propensity for foot-racing against trains crossing the bridge that spans the dry riverbed of the title. No matter that the adult women in this impoverished Depression-era Appalachian village are no happier for choosing to take the conventional female path. 'You don't talk like a girl should!' is a crime for which there is no reprieve.
This isn't really what Naomi Wallace's play is about, but it's difficult to discern just what the usually-capable Thunder And Lightning Ensemble's latest production is trying to say. It's not uncommon in actor-based companies for its membership to be of relatively uniform age, but if you're going to attempt a story requiring personae as diverse in age as hormone-riddled adolescents, stressed-out mothers and gloomily withdrawn fathers, then you should be prepared to do the work necessary to differentiate between the characters. This is especially true when the personalities are as eccentric and the narrative structure as non-linear as in Wallace's gothic tale of suicidal passion.
With the exception of Ed Schultz, who inhabits his role as a shaman-like rural sheriff so completely that we welcome his every entrance onstage, Director D.B. Schroeder's cast has not done this. Restless children chafing under thwarted ambitions and weary parents mired down in despair all speak and move with no noticable physical or metabolic variation, and ( excluding the aforementioned Schultz ) there is no trace of dialect to locate us environmentally.
Make no mistake, these are talented artists, their performances commensurate with those of an advanced-level classroom exercise. But when an angry 17-year-old rebel comes off as more matronly than her own mom, we can only regret the absence of urgency enabling us to contemplate the cultural dimensions of literary archetypes when we should be perched breathlessly on the edge of our seats.