Women's work

NETC can't fix My Mother Said I Never Should

by Steve Vineberg

MY MOTHER SAID I NEVER SHOULD By Charlotte Keatley. by Linda Cross Saupé. Set designed by Katie Smith. Costumes by Polly Flynn. Lighting by Christopher Gates. With Susan Nest, Ellen O'Neall Waite, Linda Johnson, and Aimée Bel D'Agostino. A New England Theatre Company production, at Anna Maria College, Paxton, through May 24.

If there's a single fresh idea in the two-and-a-half-hour running time of My Mother Said I Never Should, I couldn't find it. This drab, depressingly prosaic play by contemporary British playwright Charlotte Keatley, currently in production by the New England Theatre Company, moves back and forth across the century to present glimpses from the lives of four women of different generations. But what Keatley reveals isn't the startling truth about the way in which British women have conducted their lives, with and apart from men, just what plays she's been reading: Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9 and Top Girls are most prominently featured, as well as parts of Shelah Delaney's A Taste of Honey and the kitchen-sink dramas of Arnold Wesker.

What we learn about the characters isn't enough to sustain an evening of theatre: Keatley's main observation is that each generation is more emotionally open than the previous one. Doris (born, symbolically, in 1900) marries the man she thought she loved and lives with him faithfully for more than half a century, though she discovers they don't like each other very much. Her daughter Margaret (Ellen O'Neall Waite), a child during the Blitz, raises a daughter, Jackie (Linda Johnson), who rebels in the usual ways in the '60s. When Jackie gives birth to her own illegitimate daughter, she finds her an obstacle to a burgeoning career in the art world, so Rosie (Aimée Bel D'Agostino) is raised by her grandmother, who she believes -- until Margaret's untimely death from cancer -- is her real mother. (The generational baby switch is the only new wrinkle on a theme that had been dragged through a couple of Bette Davis movies by the time Churchill lifted it for Top Girls.)

In the playwright's notes reprinted in the NETC program Keatley explains, "I kept men offstage because I wanted female language and silences, humor and sexiness and violence, to walk on stage in a way which doesn't happen if there are men present." But her dramaturgy is clumsy -- it just feels as if she's leaving things out -- and she isn't vivid enough to create a sense of the characters we don't see, so we end up having only the dimmest idea of huge sections of Doris and Margaret's lives. All we know, for example, about Margaret's marriage to Ken, which lasts for three and a half decades, is that they have a brief rocky patch in the '70s.

You want to applaud a company like NETC for taking chances, for attempting difficult, offbeat scripts. But over the past couple of years they've almost consistently chosen works that they can't make work, either because the plays simply don't work or because NETC lacks the resources to carry them off. My Mother Said I Never Should needs four classically trained English actresses and a highly experienced director with an intimate understanding of the culture Keatley is reflecting, and even they might fail to make her banalities soar. It's not an insult to the five women involved in this production -- including the director, Linda Cross Saupé -- to say that they aren't equipped for this particular challenge. Waite, who is a fine actress, gets the farthest with her role, but she's asked to play so many similar scenes that she inevitably begins to repeat herself sometime early in act two. Aimée Bel D'Agostino has some sharply defined moments late in the play; she's a promising actress, but she needs a director who will break her of her habit of playing broad, generalized feelings rather than specific objectives.

Saupé isn't that director: she seems to encourage broadness, so Susan Nest (whose work I've admired in the past) doesn't get much past a kind of generic English-old-school quality, and Linda Johnson, who has a tendency to put her lines into italics, is given three separate scenes in which she has to break down in hysterics. Big weepy numbers don't help performers; neither do scenes in which adult actors have to prance around and pretend to be children. (I usually want to look away.) And I wish Katie Smith had designed a simpler set, with blocks and levels that could serve a variety of settings rather than furniture that keeps getting in the actors' way (some of the stage-left action is obscured in the early scenes of act one) and has to be fussed with all evening. This overdressed set makes you conscious of the company's budgetary restraints; a pared-down, non-realist one could be quite elegant at the same price. NETC needs to learn how to make a virtue of necessity.