[NEohioPAL] Review of "Woman and Scarecrow" at Mamai Theatre

[Bob Abelman via NEohioPAL]

Mamaí Theatre's 'Woman and Scarecrow' offers more than meets the eye

 

Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics 

 

 

According to legend, when director and screenwriter George Seaton visited veteran actor Edmund Gwenn as he lay on his deathbed, he said to Gwenn "This must be terribly difficult for you."  Gwenn replied:  "Dying is easy, comedy is hard."  

 

Marina Carr's "Woman and Scarecrow" suggests that quite the opposite is true.  

 

The play takes place during the final moments of life for a middle-aged woman, where we learn that her youthful passions and unlimited potential were never realized due to a miserable marriage.  Immobile and on her deathbed in rural Ireland, Woman reflects on the disappointment that has been her bitter and unsatisfying existence, and agonizes over every aspect of her pending demise right down to the shoes she's to wear at her funeral.

 

Death, we are told, is most certainly hard.  But like fellow Irish writers Samuel Beckett and W.B. Yeats, Carr approaches death with a twinkle in her eye, a dark and deliciously absurd sense of humor, and an immense talent for poetic expression.  "Woman and Scarecrow" is as funny and lyrical as it is profound and powerful. 

 

Much of the comedy comes from Woman's interactions with her spiritual counterpart, an enigmatic phantom called Scarecrow, who shares the stage as her conscience or soul.  Scarecrow relentlessly diminishes Woman's morphine-enhanced flair for the romantic by placing her sorry life into proper, callous and often comedic perspective.   

 

Their constant give and take and Woman's final preparations for death are interrupted only by her philandering husband Him's brief and disinterested visits to her bedside, Auntie Ah's unwanted offering of Catholicism as comfort and counseling, and a feathered Death's impatient cries emanating from the armoire at the far end of the room.   

 

Mamaí Theatre's staging of this complex play, like the names of the characters in it - Woman, Him, Scarecrow, and Auntie Ah - could not be simpler.  The floor that is the theater's performance space contains nothing but the bed in which Woman lays, the armoire in which Death lays in wait, and a chair where Scarecrow sits when not wandering the room.  

 

At first glance, it appears as if director Pandora Robertson has done this play a disservice by undermining all the grand metaphysical and drug-induced imagery that pervades Carr's often epic language.  

 

For more of this review, go to: http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/features/article_425bef14-62e8-11e4-a6eb-6b85844c21ca.html
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