For Annie: A new play by Beth Hyland

Or: Sum

Meet Annie Lambert (Hannah Sawicki) the sweetest, kindest, most loving girl ever to grace he Beta Tau Alpha sorority, tragically ripped from the world and the fond embrace of her friends. Or rather, meet Leah who is portraying Annie in Beta Tau Alpha’s/memorial/drama therapy performance for the student body, as directed by and staring Annie’s three closet friends Kaela (Gerogi McCauley), Nora (Kaye Winks) and Jessie (Ella Pennington).

You’ll walk away from For Annie with a grab bag of ailments: a heavy heart knowing that domestic violence (which as the Beta’s inform us, eclipses the deaths injured by the wars abroad), strained shoulders waiting for Nick the boyfriend and perpetrator, played by the unwilling Raf (Daniel Shtivelberg), to hammer home, and possible tooth decay for all the high-fructose sweetness exhibited. But these ailments are offset by greatest talent that playwright Beth Hyland bestows upon the play: authenticity. The play within a play is what a student body would cobble together. It is issue focused, dance-y, loud, exhibitionist, and peppered over with crude stage devices (tiny little red napkins waved and tossed back and forth for all of Nick’s Red Flag, and dour chorus’s “I feel so guilty.” “You are.”). It’s the real mcCoy for anyone who had to play party to the ways the young grapple with grief. But its authenticity also shines out in the cracks in the curtain the play beyond the play. Particularly haunting are the half seconds when Jessie stops the show to savor a moment with her ‘sister’ before she lets her go forever.

Hyland is well served by her director Rebecca Willingham, who deftly steers the production along. Pennington and Winks both shine in Jessie and Nora’s Nice-Mean Girls personas and their unvoiced doubts. Sawicki and Shtivelberg likewise do marvelous work keeping the line of portraying Annie and Nick but keeping the shadows of Leah and Raf behind them. Nick Day as Mitch (playing Max) adds a nice soupcon of tenderness, while Charlotte Thomas as Chelsea (playing Annie’s sister Casey), hits home disinterested teen. But perhaps Hyland is the best perfumer of them all, as she juggles both the mirror and the light, and then drops between a surprising, shocking twist, when an unwanted guest (Erin O’Shea) arrives to watch the show and remind us that Annie (much like the Beta Tau Alpha’s self-preserving show) was much more than the sum of her parts.