Friday, October 10, 2003

By Anna Rosenstein

What links people together? Political or religious beliefs? Shared experience? Skin color? The world provides us with different and often conflicting answers every day and each connection it suggests between some individuals seems to create a fence between others.

	'STRING OF PEARLS' Where: City Theatre, Bingham and 13th streets, South Side. When: Through Nov. 2; Tues. 7 p.m.; Wed.-Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 5:30 and 9 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m. Tickets: $21-$32. 412-431-2489.

Theater, in its own way, tries to answer the same question. At its essence, theater is a community event. A performance brings people together, even if it's for a brief time, even if it's to ultimately disagree. It's one of the things playwright Michele Lowe relishes about her profession. Writing, she explains, is a solitary endeavor. "The fun for me is being part of a community, being in the theater with a group of people and collaborating."

Lowe, who has been in Pittsburgh since mid-September rehearsing and developing "String of Pearls," which opens City Theatre's season, has thought a lot about the bonds that unite people, what connects them and what makes them different.

The impetus for "String of Pearls," which was first done as a script-in-hand reading at City's MOMENTUM in April, was Lowe's desire to explore women at different stages of their lives. "Women when they hit their 40s really come into a completely different time in their lives. Their concerns, their joys, their dreams, their feelings, are much different than they were 10 years before."

As the idea played out, Lowe began wondering what would link the women she wanted to write about. Pearls. The idea came from everywhere and nowhere -- a friend, strangers, a museum exhibit, inspiration. With the dogged determination of a crack journalist (Lowe's degree is in journalism from Northwestern) and the curiosity and vision of an artist, Lowe began approaching women, any woman, who wore pearls. "Every woman had a story about them. They had stories about family members and husbands and friends and marriages and divorces and fathers." Lowe's own string of pearls came from her in-laws as a wedding present.

When she started working on the script, she first envisioned a series of monologues. But the play kept growing and dialogue seemed a natural progression. "The piece became much more alive when I could vary who was on stage and how they were telling the story," Lowe says.

Now there are 28 characters, all of whom share a connection to a single strand of pearls. Her concern has been that each story becomes a complete journey, each character travels a full emotional arc and that it all comes together smoothly and naturally.

"I had to treat it like it was a puzzle, to move this one strand of pearls through all these women's lives. I actually had to write a timeline and a spreadsheet," she says, laughing at the necessarily mathematical approach to her art.

In rehearsals, she's still finding new pieces, for which she credits the skill of the four actors who play all of the roles -- Rebecca Harris, Sheila McKenna, Helena Ruoti and Sharon Washington -- and director Eric Simonson of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. Lowe calls "String of Pearls" a "real actor's piece" because it's such a challenge to capture so many different characters. Each has to be different. Each has to be interesting and each has to be recognizable with minimal costume changes.

"It was very important to me," Lowe says, explaining why she created her large array of characters, "that I get a cross section of women. It wasn't that it had to be representational by any means, but I wanted to vary the palette, to make sure that these women resonated for all sorts of people who were sitting in the audience."

Lowe means all sorts of people. She shudders at the words "woman's play." "There's a feeling in some circles that women see men's stories as universal and men see women's stories as only about women. I don't buy that." A good play can pull anyone into its world. That's what Lowe really loves about theater. "When the lights go down," she smiles, "you never know what's going to happen."

Anna Rosenstein is a freelance writer.

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