Regional

Why We Have a Body

 (Judith Anderson Theater, N.Y. 94 seats; $25 top)

By JEREMY GERARD

A Women's Project and Prods. presentation of a play in two acts by Claire Chafee. Directed by Evan Yionoulis.
 
Mary - Nancy Hower
Lili - Jayne Atkinson
Eleanor - Trish Hawkins
Renee - Deborah Hedwall

 

Any lesbian tract-cum-play that includes the line "Sylvia Plath is one of the great comic writers of the 20th century" can't be all bad, and, indeed, there's plenty to be grateful for in Claire Chafee's "Why We Have a Body," reprised here by the Women's Project after a bow last year in San Francisco. Chief among its pleasures (along with some sparkling, if inconsistent, writing) is a quartet of marvelous actors, none of whom gets nearly enough work.

The central characters are the two grown daughters of Eleanor (Trish Hawkins) , a world-traveling adventuress. Mary (Nancy Hower) is something of a manic-depressive, accent on the depressive, with a Joan of Arc fixation, a fondness for holding up convenience stores and a hilarious ineptitude for her day job as a traffic cop, given that the integration of data -- such as oncoming cars -- isn't precisely her strong suit. Her sister, Lili (Jayne Atkinson), is a gay private investigator who falls in love with paleontologist Renee (Deborah Hedwall). The complication is that Renee is in the middle of a divorce, though, since this is, after all, a lesbian tract, Renee's past life as a heterosexual woman is ultimately of little consequence.

Chafee's characters all tend to speak aphorism, a dialect of playwrightese. Some of the formulations are keepers --"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results"; "Failure is like Windex -- it makes everything clear." Some, however, are idiotic --"Every woman is an incest survivor, if you count the thought of the world."

And some of the exchanges and situations have, in what is unquestionably the Golden Age of gay- and lesbian-themed theater, already become overly familiar: "Maybe I'm a man," Renee says to Lili, trying to work out the attraction. After their first night together, Renee has an epiphany --"There are women everywhere!" in a lovely monologue about the "subterranean" sexual undercurrents coursing through the workaday world. "You can't go back to not noticing," she concludes. There are even some sly references to Jodie Foster, Tatum O'Neal and the late Nancy Kulp.

Yet Chafee is capable of more beautiful writing as well, much of it given to the damaged Mary and delivered with a flatness the fine Hower makes a virtue, Mary's observations artlessly insinuating themselves into the memory. The most horrible aspect of Joan of Arc's burning at the stake, she says, was not the pain, but "the shame of being naked in front of so many men." Later she recounts a "feminist nightmare" in which she and Lili have been ice-fishing in their native Minnesota, only to catch first Virginia Woolf, then Ophelia and, finally, St. Joan's still-beating heart. Yet the only message Mary derives from the experience is: "Fish somewhere else."

Hedwall brings characteristic nuance to the role of Renee; no one plays that electric mix of ambivalence and conviction better, and she spends much of the play physically at an oblique angle to Lili (at least when they're not horizontal), something even Lili finally comments on. Atkinson may have the toughest job of the four -- with Lili switching between foil to her sister and vulnerable guide to her unexpected lover -- and she handles the role with considerable grace. Hawkins -- lovingly recalled as Sally Talley in Lanford Wilson's 1979 "Talley's Folly" and rarely spotted since -- is twinkle-eyed and charming as the exotic, absentee Eleanor.

Peter B. Harrison's spare, abstract set suggests a sacrificial altar with leavening touches, and both Donald Holder's lighting and Teresa Snider-Stein's costumes are unfussy and direct. Evan Yionoulis has staged the play with a keen sensitivity to its offbeat rhythms. I still don't get the title, but Chafee makes her Gotham debut with a dream team.

Set, Peter B. Harrison; lighting, Donald Holder; costumes, Teresa Snider-Stein; sound, Janet Kalas; production stage manager, Renee Lutz; casting, Judy Dennis. Opened Nov. 8, 1994. Reviewed Nov. 7. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.