Friday, October 17, 2003

By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic

Whatever the theatrical equivalent for the term "chick flick" may be, Michele Lowe's "String of Pearls" is the thing itself, a thoughtful comedy almost entirely about relationships between women, mainly mothers and daughters.

	'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-CITY.

Now enjoying its world premiere at City Theatre, "String of Pearls" is in the "La Ronde" mode of discrete stories held together by some linking device that eventually brings the series full circle. Here, that device is a string of pearls that passes from woman to woman. An occasional man may serve as conduit, holding the pearls briefly as purchaser, peddler or thief -- the pearls frequently serve as a medium of financial, emotional or erotic exchange -- but it's only the women who actually make them important to their lives.

There are about 11 of these women, depending how you sort out the stories, though three never actually wear the pearls. The core of Lowe's play is in their life stories, told in some dialogue but mainly narration ("and then I did this, and then she did that"). The interlocking proves more than just a plot device, because each story also contributes to the central, complementary themes of self definition, female bonding and the deeply determinative mother-daughter axis.

Men do indeed figure into many stories, sometimes as lovers, often as exes, almost always as tangents to the main emotional thrust. The pearls enter the story as the symbolic confirmation of a love in which a sex act known as "string of pearls" plays a pivotal role, and they eventually symbolize another love -- seemingly improbable but oddly touching -- before, at the very end, finding an appropriate home with a young bride in just the sort of hopeful marriage with which comedy traditionally completes its journey of regeneration.

As this suggests, this touching new play is structurally, emotionally and metaphorically described by its own title. To start, the play is itself a string of pearls, the pearls being the women we meet and their stories. But in spite of the play's sponsorship by Mikimoto, masters of pearl culturing, there's nothing cultured, graded or matched about them -- they are wholly natural, varyingly shaped, some even deformed with anger or regret.

In "String of Pearls," as with any string of pearls, it's the pearls that matter, not the string. But as Lowe's play snakes its 100-minute circular journey, the string -- the plot developments or accidents that connect the different stories -- becomes very important. It would best serve the individual scenes if the connections receded into the background, but I found a great deal of my attention engaged by understanding them, admiring their cleverness and weighing their plausibility.

I suspect that focus on structure and plot is a male thing, but Lowe's ingenuity invites it. The result has an added "Where's Waldo?" appeal, but what happens to the pearls in any sequence can distract from a compelling personal drama to which the pearls are peripheral.

For the play to realize its higher self, I think you should react primarily to the luminosity, color, shape and individuality of the varied emotional stories it contains, not be intrigued by the manner of their stringing. But those pearls do glow, nonetheless. And here the effect of the play is inseparable from the substantial contributions of the direction, design and acting.

Eric Simonson's careful direction is most obvious in the seamless way the play progresses. The blue-gray set by Loy Arcenas, a nationally-active designer who I believe is making his Pittsburgh debut, is complexly simple, its sliding panels backed by a richly textured skyscape, with, in the floor, a luminous glass rectangle of shimmering water. One scene flows effortlessly into the next, the cast deftly moving a chair here or a panel there, with the whole further enhanced by Thomas Hase's graceful lights and Dave Bjornson's delicately unobtrusive sound.

For many, the play's chief attraction will be the opportunities it affords the cast of four who play all the parts.

Lowe's script identifies them simply as Woman One, Two, Three and Four. Subsequent productions may share the roles differently, but as now apportioned, each actor gets to play different ages, backgrounds, physical characteristics and even genders. Indeed, when a wholly new character appears, we have initially only the actor's physicalization and the hint of Michael Olich's costumes to suggest whether it is male or female, young or old, fat or thin. The action and the dialogue eventually make that clear, but the uncertainty gives the actors a juicy space in which to invent. It engages the audience's mind.

The emotionally articulate Helena Ruoti plays the ingenuous Beth, whose stunning, skilled biographical monologue begins the play and who returns at the end to provide surprising closure. Ruoti also plays a feisty hotel maid (from Eastern Europe?) and a strangely unhappy mother who flees her comfortable life for the companionship of what she calls "cultured white trash."

Beth's granddaughter, Amy, who is going to get married but expects not to have conventional things like children or houseplants, is played by Rebecca Harris. An attractive Hitchcock blonde, Harris plays the generally younger roles, including a slick political operative who usually sleeps with her consultants, so they can keep working at night, and a contrastingly passive daughter who, in my favorite small moment of the play, forgives her domineering mother at the last.

The thinnest assortment of roles falls to the willowy Sharon Washington, whose major character, an accidental caregiver, has a long and interesting story to tell but is burdened with a gratuitously angry attitude toward her young daughter. Washington is at her best as the hapless Kyle, a funeral home assistant with a dependent mother.

Sheila McKenna has a particularly juicy series of roles -- bland as Linda, Beth's daughter and Amy's mom, but imposing as a ballet chaperone, earthy and comic as that white trash museum-goer and fabulously hateful and funny as the archetypal imperial mom.

I had to seek help after the play to figure out some of the plot or character points I've described, and I'm sure I don't have it all right. It's still not clear to me, for example, whether Kyle is a man or a woman, whether there are two Helens or one, why Beth is never involved in her daughter's story or what finally happened to the one pearl detached from the string. Surely I'm not the only one to feel sometimes lost in the thicket of information.

Of course, the serial form almost requires that some characters remain frustratingly underwritten. Doubtless I missed details along the way. And perhaps worrying about inconsistencies is just the foolish consistency of the male mind.

As I say, the path-finding required is like a game, if you like that sort of thing, and I do. But the play works best when you can focus on each emotional moment and reflect on the dizzying variability of human relationships, with Lowe's comic brio and flashes of poetry lighting the way toward the emotional discoveries at the end.

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