Warm but fuzzy

Hugger Mugger's thin family tale

by Steve Vineberg

HUGGER MUGGER Written and directed by Jane Dutton. With Linda Oroszko, Susan Nest, Kathleen McGrath Jordan, and Gwen Mason. Set designed by Don Ricklin. A Theatre Unlimited/Teasers & Tormentors coproduction, at Quinsigamond Community College, October 24 and 25.

If good intentions were drama, then Jane Dutton's Hugger Mugger would be the most commendable production of the season. Dutton's play, directed by the author in a production cosponsored by Theatre Unlimited and Teasers & Tormentors, is a heartfelt chamber play, set in Worcester, about the reconciliation of three sisters following the sudden death of their mother. The eldest, Barbara (played by Linda Oroszko), is the straightest of the bunch -- she's raised a family and stayed a faithful Catholic while maintaining a safe emotional distance from her siblings. The middle daughter, Rosalind (Kathleen McGrath Jordan), lives in California, exiled by her (long dead) father and, implicitly, by Barbara because she's a lesbian. She shows up with her lover, Carol (Gwen Mason), a therapist, in tow. The youngest, Lucy (Susan Nest), who's mentally challenged, has always lived at home with her mom.

The play is on the side of all the current liberal angels. It confirms self-actualization, emotional openness, and non-traditional family structures, not to mention female solidarity and recovery. (Rosalind is a sober alcoholic and the daughter of an alcoholic.) Dutton doesn't have a single cynical impulse; she wants her characters to feel good about themselves, and when they reach that goal by final curtain, which falls on a group hug (or "hugger mugger"), she leaves the audience feeling good about themselves, too.

It's not drama, however. Dutton has some talent for comic one-liners, and as a director she's skillful at pacing, but the sisters she's created are abstractions, not people. And Carol isn't even an abstraction -- she's a device. She's a therapist because the three sisters need one to guide them on the path to revelation and bonding; if we were meant to see her as a three-dimensional character, the first thing we'd think, probably, is that she's intolerably bossy and presumptuous, asking personal questions of two total strangers and then making suggestions for behavior modification. Gwen Mason is a gifted comedienne with an appealing naturalness; she tosses off as many of Carol's interferences as she can get away with. But she's fighting a losing battle with this role.

Lucy is even more of a problem, because though she's a principal character, she's almost as much of a device as Carol. She's supposed to be childlike, with surprising amounts of resourcefulness, but her dialogue is carefully seeded with nuggets of wisdom, and after a while you get the uncomfortable feeling that -- though I'm sure this is unconscious on Dutton's part -- Lucy's inability to censor herself is a convenient ploy for relaying everything the playwright wants to say. Susan Nest plays down to the role, but that's not her fault: her lines are so cutesy and so weighted that there's probably no way to make them sound like any real person would have spoken them.

The play's structure is counterdramatic: the tensions and unpleasant secrets all come out in the first act to clear the way for the sharing in the second. The dead father drank away all the money that could have gone on "extras" for the girls; Mama had to work too hard and bear too much and she was relieved when he died; Barbara rejected her gay sister; she was kept ignorant of many family truths because she was too fragile and too denying to handle them; and so on. In act two the four women play a game, initiated by the idiot (psychological) savant Lucy, where they reveal emotional corners of themselves they've hidden from each other, but by this point in the play Dutton is working toward her cozy finish, so what comes out of their mouths is awfully benign. The four actresses work together with a strong sense of commitment, and they seem to enjoy each other's company, but the play's too thin to sustain them. And the fuzzy warm feelings it elicits are too thin to sustain an audience.