Women of a Certain Age

Or: The Circle Be Unbroken

Set on election night 2016 (and first performed on that same day) Richard Nelson’s Women of a Certain Age is an American Checkov comedy, living in-between its lines and slowly de-fogging a window to look at the pains and fears and hopes of a family on the brink. The last installment in Nelson’s Gabriel trilogy finds the family waiting to see the outcome of the much contentious election, while morning the death of a husband/ex/brother/son Thomas, and the impending foreclosure of the family house. While dinner cooks and privations of the past and the future of the country are debated, bandied and joked about. Eschewing the need for a driving plot, Nelson prefers to mosey along from subject to subject, subtext to subtext, a dab hand at the ol’ dialog misdirect. Not to say that there isn’t drama, revelations, or heartbreaks aplenty, they just take time to make themselves known as scallions fry and ghosts drift through.

Alley Rep has gathered a fine group of actresses to pick their way through this thorny ground: Julia P. Bennett as Joyce, the prickly middle sister of the adult children, forever sparking trouble, Karin (Jodeen Revere), Thomas’s first wife, an actress in the midst of performing a one-woman-show about Hillary Clinton, assured in performance but an obvious outsider at the table, and Mary (Lynn Allison) Thomas’s Widow and the family’s peacekeeper. Allison flutters hummingbird-like around the table slowly sketching out a complex tapestry of loss and conviction and vulnerability, in a Jelkish flourish and a splendid performance.

But heroic as Mary is it is Patricia (Janet Summers), the family matriarch whose body and memory has run out on her, that provides the play’s core. Summers exudes the nervous energy of a helpless elder, who knows she is the elephant in the room, a sink for people’s pity or frustration. She comes closest to expressing what the whole family knows but would never say, that their world; finical and familial, is ending (and is about to get a whole lot worse). But still, in-spite of everything, the weight of grief in the air, there is still the necessity and the comfort of getting food on the table and taking joy in the little things. And in this light, like flours under ultraviolet rays, Nelson’s artistry glows.