SONORA -- Previews are supposed to help directors and performers find
the bugs in new productions, especially in working with brand-new scripts.
Around Sonora, they normally involve benefits that bring in large audiences
whose reactions offer a way of gauging a show's success and repairing
its flaws before opening the doors to full-price customers.
Thursday's preview of "A Show of Her Own" at Stage 3 showed director
Maryann Curmi and her cast of 11 just how little they needed to polish
and how ready they were for the full-price run. It's a bargain as well
as a delight.
The show, a backstage farce by Seattle native Suzanne Wingrove, kept
the audience roaring from start to finish: from the mood-setting entry
of a humming, klutzy and obviously cynical janitor to an epilogue composed
of curtain-call vignettes that carry every character from the insanely
goofy present to the improbably wacky future.
Backstage comedies usually draw more laughs from the confused entanglements
and rivalries of oddball characters than from the tribulations that
go into putting on any play. "A Show of Her Own" is no exception.
But Wingrove's script is different from most in at least one important
way: The erotic entanglements are all initiated by women.
Just about every one of them is kooky in some distinctive way, usually
involving a steamy attraction to several potential partners, including
straying husbands.
Those partners include a surprised adolescent, a neurotic actor, a
harried cop and a burly escapee from the local jail, but the differences
are irrelevant. If the object of someone's affections wears pants, nothing
else counts.
Just in case you're troubled by visions of gratuitous sex, there's
far less in "A Show of Her Own" than you'll find on prime-time TV.
The women are members of a theater guild -- who normally bake cookies
for opening-night parties -- that decides to stage a play of its own.
The task of shepherding the project falls principally to Marla Masterson
(Sarah Grimes, in a gem of comic acting), a housewife who carries a
perpetual smile on her face, a giddy tone in her voice and penchant
for orderliness in her behavior.
By intermission, that bland expression, happy voice and compulsive
neatness have been replaced by desperate looks and frequent, doubt-filled
mutterings of "I am strong."
The roles are well constructed, with crisp and credible dialogue and
occasional flashes of insight that go beyond the pursuit of laughs.
And Curmi's performers dispatch them skillfully, creating characters
who are sharp, funny and well differentiated from one another.
Stage 3 discovered the show last year through its annual New Play Festival.
When a staged reading won loads of laughs and cheers, artistic director
Barbara Segal-Mill decided to plug a full production -- a world premiere
-- into this year's schedule. That's a gamble for any theater, but this
roll of the dice is a winner.
"A Show of Her Own" runs through Aug. 26 at Stage 3 Theatre, 208 S.
Green St., Sonora. Shows start at 7 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and
Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $10-$14 for adults, $8 students,
from 536-1778.
