Miss Witherspoon: Christopher Durang Explains A Decent Amount Of It For You

"At this performance, the flowers usually played by carnations will be played by tulips", the pre-show announcement advises us, and indeed there are some lovely artificial tulips on stage, growing alongside knee-high hills of plastic grass. The puffy white clouds painted on the walls help give the appearance of a nursery school classroom. But the serenity of the vision is busted by a franticly animated woman who is terrified that the sky may be falling. And in fact, an actress dressed as Chicken Little crosses the stage to warn us that yes, the sky is falling, and the frantically animated woman finds herself dodging large metal objects that crash to the floor with mighty thuds. But wait... that's not the sky falling. No, it's really Skylab falling.

Yes, dear readers, Christopher Durang has written a new play.

It's usually best not to ask "Why?" with Durang, who sometimes seems to be making plot points out of whatever might provide the best punch line. That certainly seems the case in this absurd comedy of a woman so exasperated with life ("I'm anti-depressant resistant") that when she finds herself in the bardo (a Tibetan word referring to an intermediate state of consciousness that comes between death and reincarnation into a new life) she keeps fouling up efforts to have her soul reincarnated, begging the afterlife folk to just knock her out into an eternal rest.

Don't think too much about why the title character (a daffy and loveably cynical Kristine Nielsen) keeps insisting she was once married to Rex Harrison, despite the explanation of her afterlife spiritual guide, Maryamme (a perpetually soothing Mahira Kakkar), that it wasn't really Rex Harrison, but that her soul was once involved with the soul that would eventually become Rex Harrison in one of its future lifetimes. It's not character exploration. It's silliness. Good silliness. Only slightly deeper is the explanation of why she is given the spiritual name of "Miss Witherspoon"; it seems she has an aura the color of brown tweed, "like some negative Englishwoman in an Agatha Christie book who everybody finds bothersome." Maryamma's mission, besides getting her assigned soul to pronounce her name properly, is to help guide Miss Witherspoon into lifetimes which will help her learn lessons.

Colleen Werthmann and Jeremy Shamos play the loving yuppie couple that parent Miss Witherspoon in her next life, as well as the trailer trash mom and pop who treat her miserably in the one after that. Lynda Gravatt is the teacher who attempts to rescue her, and later appears as Jesus Christ, though one character mistakes her for Josephine Baker. All do nicely with their familiar two-dimensional characters.

Under Emily Mann's sprightly direction, and especially with Kristine Nielsen's comic crackle, Miss Witherspoon, begins with 45 minutes of good laughs, with jokes along the lines of finding out that Thornton Wilder has reincarnated into Arianna Huffington, and lots of fun commentary on the state of affairs down here on earth. It's that last 45 minutes, when everything is awkwardly mooshed into some kind of message, where the laughs dissolve into withering chuckles and you're grateful for those soft, cushy seats at Playwright's Horizons. He's obviously trying to say something here. Is it that we should live life to the fullest, take positive risks and try to improve ourselves? Lovely thoughts, not doubt, but not enough to sustain such debate throughout a ninety minute play. For the last twenty minutes or so I kept picturing an angelic Peggy Lee watching over the proceedings and singing an extra chorus of "Is That All There Is?"

And yet... those who really love Durang will probably have a blast.

 

Photos by Joan Marcus: Top: Mahira Kakkar, Jeremy Shamos, Kristine Nielsen and Lynda Gravatt
Bottom: Jeremy Shamos, Kristine Nielsen and Collenn Werthmann

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