SALT City Women

Director Garrett Heater champions the company philosophy in casting the 11 vignettes of Jane Martin’s Talking With. . . ,
currently being mounted at the Mulroy Civic Center’s BeVard Room.
Admittedly, he’s working with some of the most talented and admired
players in community theater, with many of their names heard during the
annual Syracuse New Times Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT)
Awards ceremonies. But every time he breaks with expectations, the show
wins. Who knew that longtime chorine Kristie Grant had within her a
raging young mother in the midst of labor pains? And for the first
time, Parsee leading lady Binaifer Dabu gets to speak with an Indian
accent.

The usual rap against Talking With. . .  (first
produced in 1981) is that it’s not so much a drama as a collection of
audition pieces, as if there were something wrong with that. Other
local productions have put the 11 items in different order, but
Heater’s choices are clearly thought out and make sense. He begins with
“Fifteen Minutes,” about the anticipation of performance and the agony
of self-revelation, and ends with “Lamps,” on the acceptance of the
inevitability of death. The allotment of work, alas, is uneven, as some
players are climbing mountains while others are asked only to skip
rope. That’s for our benefit. We couldn’t stand uninterrupted
breath-stopping intensity for more than two hours.

Ladies’ night: Binaifer Dabu (center, with her family at the 2008 SALT Awards) is one of 11 actresses performing in Simply New’s Talking With. . .

The identity of Jane Martin, America’s
best-known unknown playwright, has become an open secret that everyone
knows. Although he persists in denying it, Jon Jory, longtime head of
Actors Theater of Louisville and the Humana Drama Festival,
unmistakably wrote the plays attributed to Jane Martin, perhaps with
the assistance of his wife and other women. All Jane Martin plays
premiered in Louisville, and the monologues are filled with local
references like “Muhammad Ali Boulevard,” named for the local boxer.
The cultural perspective is hinterland, not to say Red State, with
allusions to evangelical religion and rodeos. None of these
characterizations would appear in a Sondheim musical.

Although the purpose of each monologue
appears to require the performers to embody and build upon related
emotions, some of the narratives come with an O. Henry-esque plot twist at the end. In “Fifteen Minutes,”
an actress (Moe Harrington), dressed in a robe and slippers, is
preparing backstage for her performance. A Juilliard graduate with two
Broadway credits, she acknowledges that her current gig represents a
slide from glory. She breaks through the fourth wall and demands what
the audience asks of her and how much of herself she must reveal. But
not until she dons her costume do we guess what she has come to. In the
second act’s “Marks,” a well-spoken professional woman (Kate
Huddleston), who always did what was expected of her, relates
dispassionately how her husband left her, finding her shallow and
unmarked by life. Then, as she pulls away her well-tailored suit, her
gleaming white skin reveals secrets unseen by passing eyes.

Some of the monologues edge into
fantasy, such as the birthing mother (Kristie Grant) in “Dragons” who
roars what erotic satisfaction she gains by giving birth to a monster
in the Catholic hospital of the Immaculate Conception. The motley-clad
character (Katheryn Guyette) in “Scraps” sees herself as “midway
between a rag doll and rainbow” and is merging with the myth of the
Wizard of Oz. Another is well-grounded in reality, like the homeless
woman (Nora O’Dea) in “French Fries” who doesn’t want to leave
McDonald’s because nobody dies or goes crazy there. Blessed with some
of the wittiest lines in the production, the bag lady also teases the
theme of immortality connecting several monologues: “God gave us
plastic so we would know what the everlasting is.”

Only one character speaks with something
approaching an edge: the old performer (Judy Schmid) in “Rodeo,” who
speaks to both gender issues and commercialization. Conceptually, this
is one of Heater’s boldest casting reversals as Schmid was last seen as
the scantily clad cupcake in Salt City Center’s May 2008 What the Butler Saw,
but here she’s the butchiest person we encounter. An early battle was
getting women allowed on the rodeo circuit, not only herself but an
especially top-heavy rider who could handle a horse better than a man,
even though when thrown her breasts burrowed holes deep enough to plant
trees in. Late in life she is battling Disneyfication, which means that
as a performer she is “nothin’ but merchandise.”

The theme of performance itself that runs through many
monologues dominates three especially. In “Audition” a nutcase aspiring
actress (Shannon Tompkins) will undergo humiliation and
self-destruction to qualify. In “Twirler,” another sequence with some
of the best lines, a pencil-thin baton twirler (newcomer Jillian
Dailey) argues for the artistic veracity of her often-dismissed
specialty. (“It’s blue collar zen. I have seen God from 30 feet up.”)
Performance merges with fundamentalist belief in the snake-wielder
(Katharine Gibson) of “Handler.” Speaking in the heaviest mountain
dialect, Gibson’s character is the most-involved metaphysically and
also the most frightening. She might be testifying her faith, but she’s
also risking death: “You can fool a person, but you can’t fool a snake.”

There’s not a weak delivery in the lot,
and it feels invidious to make comparisons, but pride of place and
theme give prominence to the mature woman (Binaifer Dabu) recounting
the death of her aged and difficult mother in “Clear Glass Marbles,”
and another woman dressed in a spectral nightgown (Rosemary
Palladino-Leone) in “Lamps,” describing the extinction of all the light
the life has given her.

At just short of a dozen, Talking With. . . includes
the widest assortment of SALT winners and nominees we have ever seen.
If these monologues were supposed to be audition pieces, each one of
them could be going for the gold. 

This production runs through Saturday, Feb. 7. See Times Table for information.