Not Just Folks

FIFTEEN YEARS ago, when women at Mount Holyoke College learned to curtsy as well as to read Baudelaire, every graduating class was acutely aware of its uncommon talents and training, and seniors felt they had to choose missions in life before graduation. Wendy Wasserstein's Uncommon Women and Others recreates that era with humor and even affection, but somewhat pedantically shows that the transition between discovering one's talents and choosing one's mission is tenuous at best.

Uncommon Women might be considered a feminist play if it did not present such a wide range of uncommon talents and corresponding missions, including both devoted wife and ambitious career woman, as equally disastrous. The message seems not to be that women are unfairly restricted to particular roles, but it is wrong for them to have to choose any single role at all.

South House's production of the play is long on energy and humor, but short on tension and meaning. Director Steve Drury maintains a quick pace by emphasizing punchy one-liners and alternating settings, but it is a peculiar quickness without tension. The audience merely waits from one witty remark to the next without expecting or hoping for any particular action. Wasserstein's views come across, but not forcefully, and they seem less relevant to life at Harvard than they ought to.

Indeed, the underlying problem of the production may be that it hits too close to home. Uncommon Women's immediacy to life at Harvard is at the same time its greatest source of interest and its greatest weakness. Both the all-female cast and much of the audience presumably face in their personal lives the same burning questions asked and answered by each character in the play: what are my uncommon talents and how can I use them after graduation? For a Harvard audience, this is a primary facet of the show's interest. For the student actresses, it creates a problem of distance: they are often unable to withdraw far enough from their roles to see them clearly, or else they withdraw too far, leaving the audience with funny but empty portrayals of Mount Holyoke social types.

Kirsten Skrinde as lusty, honest Rita and Eliza Gagnon as imaginative, quiet Carter carry off their roles with greatest success. Skrinde's Rita is the most consistently funny character, but there is a bite to her humor, as in her account of a job interview: after tea and charming conversation, the interviewer asked her if she had experience with a xerox machine--"yes," she said, "and I've tasted my menstrual blood, too." Gagnon's brooding Carter is so contained at the start of the play that when she finally erupts, announcing her goal "to put Wittgenstein on film," she seems eccentric but credible.

All the other actresses are competent enough to fill stereotypes without seeming too shallow: Kate, who ambitiously pursues a career despite the loneliness it forces on her; Samantha, a pragmatist who decides she is not very talented and therefore should sacrifice herself to a husband who is; Holly, a kind person who lacks the drive to succeed; Muffett, who says she is not promiscuous, but hates going to bed alone; Leilah, who realizes she is not brilliant, but only "highly competent," and so moves to Iraq to make competent additions to the field of sociology; and Susie Friend, an over-enthusiastic air-head who loves school teas.

THE GREATEST disappointment in the cast is Shirley Wilber as Mrs. Plumm, the house mother of a Mount Holyoke dormitory. It seems impossible to reconcile Wilber's outstanding performances in other Harvard productions (such as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet) with her tentative acting here.

The set of Uncommon Women is an ordinary living room, dining room and sofa. There is no stage or seats, so the audience sits on the floor amongst the actresses. In some productions, mixing actors and audience serves a legitimate theatrical value; in Uncommon Women, there is no purpose to such an arrangement. Not only is it inconvenient for the actors to climb over the audience in order to move from the living room to the dining room to the sofa, but the seating is quite uncomfortable when there is a full house.

There is no variable lighting on the set, merely bare bulbs. In place of lighting changes, Drury ingeniously uses an ironic recording of a public relations tape for Mount Holyoke. The monotone on the tape describes the college with all the functional appeal of a vacuum cleaner salesman and the pretentiousness of a sommelier enumerating his finest crus.

Uncommon Women begins and ends in the present, but most of the action is a recollection of events ten years in the past. To Harvard students acutely aware of their uncommon talents, it speaks of the future, urging friendships over missions and humor over ambition.