Theater review: ‘Alabaster’ has sophistication, suffering and surprising wit
June — dressed in a bathrobe and pajamas, the central character in “Alabaster” — takes her morning coffee cup and offers Alice, a visitor, a sip of a “variation on coffee.” What’s the variation? Bourbon.
Unexpected exchanges that hide suggestions of comedy, dysfunction, suffering and connection are characteristic of the play that just opened at the Capital Stage theater.
The surrounding setting is a bedroom adjacent to a stable. Also, there are adjacent wood panels with missing or broken boards, and we recognize we are in a familiar yet strange world. On the bedroom walls hang numerous paintings of a kind of primitive folk art, childlike in its conception; toward stage right are oddly discordant tools of modern photography. The setting is a farm in Alabaster, Alabama. That town, a suburb of Birmingham, actually exists. Perhaps the suggestion is that alabaster is a durable and superior art material that is often ignored or neglected.
The first speaker is Weezy — played skillfully by Amy Kelly as a large, comfortable, uncensored woman, often spewing four-letter words — who informs the audience she is a goat, yet she clearly speaks recognizable and often quite comic English, though her mother Bib, nearby, only offers “ba-a-a.” Through much of the central action and dialogue, Weezy lounges leisurely in a deck chair beyond the bedroom set, sipping beer, munching on popcorn. Weezy is at various times our unexpected guide to this world, a kind of third voice to June and Alice, a sort of stage manager from a very different “Our Town,” serving as an alter ego and voice of unexpressed intentions or meanings that stem from the id. An indication of Weezy’s relationship with her owner, alter ego June, is initially synthesized by the quick middle finger June offers Weezy at one point in response to a sarcastic critique. Though Weezy is clearly a human actor dressed in human clothing, at a midpoint in the play we see large, attractive photos of goats — taken by Alice — sometimes with June.
Stephanie Altholz, in a demanding role as June, modulates effectively between rudeness, wisdom, and lasciviousness. June is the survivor of a tornado that struck her family farm. She has attracted Alice (Susan Maris), a famous photographer who has come from the wilds of Brooklyn to photograph a series of women with scars, of whom June is number seven. Maris shows skill with a camera and lighting equipment, and does a fairly convincing series of yoga exercises midway through the play. Other elements of new-age “therapy” here include deep breathing and a guided visualization.
A series of conflicts and seeming contrasts emerges: New York, Alabama; city, country; sophistication, rustic awareness. Alice has come from her sophisticated world where she used to photograph celebrities such as Demi Moore and where she knew Annie Leibowitz. Her confrontation and interaction with June are the meat of the drama before us.
Though June has visible scars, she suspects and we learn that Alice has some invisible ones as well. June may have survived a tornado, but Alice also has suffered great personal loss. Yet these details and what they mean to the two women, only emerge gradually, initially through a mutual game of questions and answers. At some level underlying the action and dialogue are trauma and the search for healing, for the two female goats as well as the two women. June and Alice sense their need for each other, and move emotionally closer as the action develops.
Among the surprises the play offers is the varied, witty, pained character of June. June has never been on an airplane and has spent her entire life on the farm in rural Alabama. For a “living,” she tends goats and grows okra. Nevertheless she immediately recognizes the distinctive, disturbing celltone that emerges periodically from Alice’s unanswered phone as the theme from a movie and wonders who it identifies and hides. June displays surprising and charming sophistication (and potential) but doesn’t like phones such as this one and prefers, as she calls them, “dumb” phones.
June is surprisingly literate, talented and even sophisticated. Alice compares June’s paintings to those of Jimmie Lee Sudduth, an actual Alabama folk artist of some renown. An audience member may be forgiven for thinking the displayed paintings on the walls seem surprisingly rudimentary. Though she may seem initially a hick, June knows enough to do research through a friend who is a librarian, and is surprisingly conversant with popular culture as well as human psychology.
The playwright observes in a “Note” to her script that as we watch the play we are “worn down by the never-ending savage blows of life . . and are faced with our own mortality.” Perhaps it remains to be seen whether the substance of what we see on stage can sustain such overwhelming intellectual freight.
If you go
“Alabaster” by Audrey Cephaly, directed by Kirstin Clippard
Where: Capital Stage
When: The play runs through February 23, with performances Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 7 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m.; with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m.
The play lasts two hours, with an intermission.
Cost: $32 to $44, with $5 discounts for seniors.
Tickets: capstage.org or the box office can be reached by phone at 916-995-5464.
This story was originally published January 28, 2020 at 1:30 PM.