February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Joseph Hurley
BOLD GIRLS, by Rona Munro. Directed by Hayley Finn. Starring Marian Tomas Griffin, Jordan Simons, Denise Lute and Sasha Eden. Produced by Women’s Expressive Theater. At Urban Stages, 259 W. 30th St., NYC. Through April 21.
The valor and courage of the women of Belfast is hardly a subject of mystery to audiences attending Irish-oriented theater events on New York Stages.
"Ourselves Alone," by Anne Devlin, daughter of the late union leader Paddy Devlin, told the story of three such women, and was produced locally not once, but twice, in recent seasons, the second staging having closed only a couple of months ago.
"Binlids," a production of the recently disbanded Dubbeljoint Theatre Company, came to the Lower East Side a couple of years ago, not only telling the stories of a handful of women in Northern Ireland’s capital, but bringing several individuals along to take part in vivid theatrical reenactments of incidents from their own lives.
Rona Munro’s "Bold Girls," on view at Urban Stages on West 30th Street, deals with a quartet of strife-ridden Belfast women, one of whom, Marie, is the widow of a slain mate, while another, Cassie, is the sorrowing mate of a long-imprisoned husband.
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The play’s four-actress cast is fleshed out by Nora, the mother of Cassie, and Deirdre, an enigmatic character who at first appears to be, perhaps, a ghost, but who eventually, in playwright Munro’s awkward dramaturgy, proves to be something quite different indeed.
"Bold Girls" comes across as alarmingly similar to Devlin’s more skilled work, with its cloistered collection of disturbed, grieving women, related by blood and/or marriage, and forced by circumstances to live in a confined, pressure-cooker situation.
The men, villainous and valorous alike, present in "Ourselves Alone" remain resolutely absent from "Bold Girls," except perhaps by reflection, since they occupy a good deal of the conversation in which this rancorous quartet of mainly embittered women engage. Munro’s decision to leave male Belfast out of her text, except in a distinctly second-hand manner, is understandable, but it appears to have stranded her, to the play’s detriment, with an unpleasant gaggle of frustrated females, only one of whom seems to be seeking an escape route from the quandary in which she finds herself.
Munro’s play is set in 1991. Marie, played by Marian Tomas Griffin, is the most sympathetic figure in "Bold Girls." Widowed and the mother of an unseen child, she lives with a positive image of her slaughtered husband, a vision that, in the play’s final scenes, proves to be inaccurate in the extreme.
Jordan Simons, in a somewhat overwrought performance, comes to making a villainess of Cassie, frustrated by her husband’s lengthy imprisonment and seemingly unable to control conflicting elements in her own life.
Nora, Cassie’s mother, appears at first to be the primary occupant of the modest home in the part of West Belfast. Ultimately it becomes clear that Marie is the householder, and Cassie and Nora are merely casual, albeit frequent, visitors.
As appealingly rendered by Denise Lute, Nora emerges as a sort of referee in the squabbles that occupy Marie and Cassie.
The fourth character, Deirdre, as acted by Sasha Eden, is, as the expression puts it, an enigma wrapped in a conundrum, a situation not improved upon by a conspicuously dreadful attempt at a Belfast accent.
Considering the ghostlike and only partially motivated presence of Deirdre, whom the other characters at times seem not to see, even though she is standing among them, it may be that playwright Munro was striving for at least a partial removal from cold reality, a goal that, unfortunately, she didn’t entirely achieve.