Madam Euphoria Reveals Your Future

A New Play by Jenny Sternling

Or: Bear Necessities

In Madam Euphoria Reveals Your Future playwright Jenny Sternling we find ourselves steeped the clean, solid silence of the western woods. Though only played out in the vacant air, Sternling’s writings conjure up a fable, rich in language and sticky with wonder, solid-rooted and ponderous as a pine. Planted by her caravan, thriving in the mountains air is Madam Euphoria (Jodeen Revere) a genuine psychic living the quiet life, far away from the clamoring and scheming minds she used to read. A chance encounter with a young mother, Elizabeth (Elizabeth Rathbone) and her husband James (Dwayne Blackaller) the local Sheriff, draws Madam Euphoria out of her retirement and into, twist!, a terrifying thriller.

And then there is also Bear. Bear(Mathew Cameron Clark) is a bear who sometimes stops to chat with Madam Euphoria sharing a deep, woodsy Buddhist wisdom. It’s a marvelous friendship, and Sternling does a sterling job of sketching out what a bear might think, un-anthropomorphized, innocent, yet resonantly poetic and powerful. Clark’s slow shamble and chesty growls show us how a bear might live in human skin, but the part is so well written you feel anyone could fall into Bear’s gravitational well and swing into his orbit.

Revere to does sterling work quietly commanding the story. The connection between her fellow acorns sparks or arcs lighting-like, but on top of that is an unmistakable look as she balances the unseen conversations, the teaming thoughts that swirl around her, or, chillingly, visions of an unseen menace with mischief on its mind.

We start the play with that menace, Mr. Cheval (Arthur Glen Hughes) singing a nursery rhyme, and while the piteous horror lurks unseen the fear of the play, along with the heart, is quite palpable. Sternling sometimes leaves the more archetypal characters a little unvarnished and favors river-stone like dialog, each scene and sentence weighed and tossed into the air, but the play carries a depth to it, a comfort. She even gets into delightful mundane things, like socks, bras, and wonders of water. The pride and punishment of Madam Euphoria’s condition is thought out to a T and the fairytale that is woven around her, where those lost find themselves and peace and forgiveness can bloom create a fully real, but wondrous story for us to stroll and lose ourselves, for a time.