What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

Herland – Redtwist Theatre

Herland, a new play getting its Chicago premiere at Redtwist, is the story of three friends who decide that rather than shuffle off to a sad retirement community, they are going to form one of their own. Their defacto leader, Jean, converts her garage, the previously off-limits rehearsal space for her ex-husband’s Bruce Springsteen cover band, into her office and the headquarters of their planned retirement community. She hires an intern to help them, primarily by being more comfortable with technology. The name of the play is taken from a 1915 utopian novel about a world with no men.

This show is a bit of a shift in tone from what I normally expect from Redtwist. I’ve seen this theater perform Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and Ibsen (Ghosts) among others, and they all share a certain…tension…for lack of a better word. In those other shows, the atmosphere is charged with emotion and the action revolves around Secrets that will be Dramatically Revealed. I love them, don’t get me wrong, but it did prime me a bit to wait for the other shoe to drop that never came. In place of wrenching confessions, Herland is the story of four women just going about their lives as best they can, and therein lies its charm.

The cast is very, very good. Kathleen Ruhl, as Jean, is the ringleader of the trio and it’s her idea to form their own retirement community. Something that applies to the cast as a whole, but to Ruhl particularly, is how natural her performance is. Either she wasn’t acting at all, or she is a very gifted actor (Sidenote: I think it’s the latter). There was something in her cadence, and the way she would repeat the odd word here or there that just felt very authentic and unforced, like a real person speaking, and not an actor ‘acting.’ marssie Mencotti plays the gossip of the group, Louise. I saw, and loved, Mencotti last year in City Lit’s The Safe House where she portrayed a grandmother dealing with the onset of Alzheimer’s. Mencotti had the audience eating out of her hand in Safe House, and she infuses Louise with the same bubbly energy. She’s used to being the center of attention and getting her way, and everyone around her usually smiles and lets her get away with it. Rounding out the group is recently out Terry, portrayed by Valerie Gorman. She’s the quietest of the group, and Gorman did a fantastic job making her still waters run deep. Above all, all three actresses gave the dynamic of the group some real depth. They felt like a group of women who had been friends for decades with the accumulated memories and tiny fights (and a few big fights) that go along with that friendship.

Simran Bal plays Natalie, the recent high school graduate who agrees to be Jean’s ‘intern’ for the summer. Bal did a very good job portraying the uncertainty of early adulthood, and it balances well with her castmates’ portrayal of the uncertainty of later adulthood. You keep waiting for the moment where you ‘feel’ like an adult with the answers you assumed the adults around you have. The truth is, as portrayed by Jean, Louise, and Terry, is that moment never comes. You just keep going and figuring out things as best you can. It would be very easy for the dynamic between Natalie and the other three to come off as cloying or patronizing – the live theater equivalent of an After School Special, and the skill of all of the cast kept it grounded in something genuine and affecting.

If I have to level a complaint, I think the show’s dream sequences didn’t quite land with the same effectiveness as the dialogue. I get why they were there, and it’s largely where the connective tissue of the Boss’ music comes through, but I think they ended up breaking the action a little more than I’d like.

I do want to single out set design, though, a strength for this theater. Red Twist’s small storefront is converted into Jean’s cluttered garage, and they really nailed it. It seems like a small thing, but it’s very easy to get wrong, usually because everything looks too new, or is too consciously “What goes in a garage?” The mix of items was appropriately hodgepdoge, and as my theater companion noticed, there was even a layer of dust on everything.

I think the most effective part of the show for me is how ‘normal’ everyone was. If they were too perfect, too larger than life, then the show becomes a Golden Girls knock-off. Too deeply flawed, and it would lose it’s easy charm. In the show’s namesake, none of the women have last names, because even if they didn’t take a husband’s name, they would still inherit their father’s. Their identity would always be tied to a man. At one point in the show, Jean mentions that her ex-husband always introduced her as ‘his Jean’ even though he was never ‘her Bob.’ He was always Bob’s Bob, as she puts it. Jean and her friends may be at a very different place than young Natalie, but ultimately they are all searching for the same thing: to belong to themselves. This play is a lovely, funny, and ultimately quite moving exploration of that search.

Highly Recommended

Reviewed by Kevin Curran

Presented March 16 – April 14, by Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W, Bryn Mawr, Chicago.

Tickets are available by calling 773-728-7529 or by going to www.redtwist.org.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com.