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Volume 2, Issue 22
October 12 - October 25, 2000 |
Cicilia A. Yakhlef
Being without love rests easier on the gut than the splintered shards of a broken heart. The sentiment, relentlessly played out in "The Maiden's Prayer," catches deep in the gills of anyone who's ever been hooked by the wrong lover.
The play focuses on four main characters and their various dysfunctional quests for love. Opening the play with the wedding of Cynthia and Taylor, playwright Nicky Silver immediately sets up glaring examples of the various ways love can cut deeply. Cynthia's marriage to Taylor has broken the heart of her sister, Libby, who is hopelessly in love with her sister's new husband. The newlyweds couldn't seem to care less, marking their wedding day with venomous and cruel assertions that although Taylor did sleep with Libby first, he doesn't love her, and she ought to just "face the facts."
Paul, Taylor's best friend, happens to be gay and also in love with Taylor. Paul and Libby of course become fast friends, and it is their friendship and subsequent search for love in all the wrong places that propels the action of the play. Ironically, Paul becomes the emotional conscience who links Libby, her sister and her sister's new husband-- three people who, although related by blood and marriage, just can't seem to connect with each other on anything but a tenuously superficial level.
Full of theatrical techniques like flashback, parallel dialogues, interactive misenscenes and tasty interior expositions, Nicky Silver approaches a well-worn subject with a very realistic and poignantly painful reality check. The script adeptly explores four fully-developed characters who just can't seem to get it right, who can't be honest with themselves and others, whose masks represent anything but the true feelings they hold for each other. Paul is perhaps the most honest and balanced of these characters, but he needs them as well. Painful revelations, alcoholic dysfunctions, heartless cruelties and all, they are the only thing in his life that is real and Paul, like the audience, can't seem to drag himself away.
Poignantly poetic dialogue drives home the interior crises experienced by the central characters, but the tone and message is somewhat lightened by an inserted character named Andrew, Paul's lingering one-night stand. Andrew is perhaps the alter ego of all the disastrously twisted and resistant emotions scattered throughout the play. Andrew believes in love. He cheerfully and tenderly wings his way through the plot like a butterfly dancing on a gentle breeze. Even though he has many failures and disappointments, his convictions never waver. In the end it is Andrew, the flagrantly optimistic "fool" who finds true love and has the good sense to appreciate it.
An altogether artfully written play with many levels of meaning, this might be one I'd opt to see a second time. Ron Mediatore, Lindy Phelps, Brynn Summer Shaw, Nicholas Kargel and Matthew Smith all give well-developed performances. The actors have dug deep to find the relationships between the characters they are portraying on stage, and they give the audience an optimum performance. Kudos on all counts. A