A Feminine Ending (Portland Center Stage)
Adulthood, as it turns out, was overrated.
October 28th, 2009
Orphée (Portland Opera) | Into the underworld with Philip Glass.0 comments
October 21st, 2009
Hofesh Shechter Company (White Bird) | An Israeli-born dancemaker spars with Portland. 1 comment
October 14th, 2009
Fiction (Portland Playhouse) | Writer’s block got you down? Try adultery!0 comments
October 7th, 2009
Ben Franklin: Unplugged (Portland Center Stage) | Josh Kornbluth has (founding) father issues.0 comments
September 30th, 2009
La Bohème (Portland Opera) | Lush tales from urban Bohemia.0 comments
September 30th, 2009
Ragtime (Portland Center Stage) | A complete work of E.L. Doctorow, abridged.0 comments
September 23rd, 2009
Autumn at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival | Tilting at windbags.0 comments
September 16th, 2009
Ursula (Our Shoes Are Red/The Performance Lab) | Mother Superior jumps the gun.0 comments
August 26th, 2009
Jazz And Poetry And Other Reasons | Solo boho at the CoHo.0 comments
August 12th, 2009
The Bullet Round (The David Mamet School for Boys) | SPOILER: Somebody gets shot.0 comments
![]() Baggie ladies in A Feminine Ending IMAGE: owen carey |
[February 13th, 2008]
Amanda’s hands are giving her trouble. They seem to have a life of their own, resisting her efforts to appear calm by flitting about her head and belying her internal turmoil. It’s not her fault; she’s fictional. The guilty party here is actress Brooke Bloom, who’s cruelly equipped her character with a remarkable variety of tics of the sort not uncommon among the young and smart and anxious. Amanda rubs her hands together when she has to wait, wipes her eyes when she’s confronted, and her nose when she’s confused. Even when she’s just chatting, there they are, fluttering.
Amanda has much bigger problems than her tics to deal with. Her boyfriend (Peter Katona), an up-and-coming pop star living off her charity, may be sleeping with his manager; her mother (Sharonlee McLean) has contrived a plan to leave her likable but boring husband (Ken Land) of 30 years; and her high-school boyfriend, Billy (Jedadiah Schultz), has moved in next door to her parents. But what really worries Amanda is that no one takes her seriously as an artist or a person. She blames sexism (and the problem of gender in general), but those hands sure as hell aren’t helping.
A Feminine Ending , brought to PCS almost completely intact from its West Coast premiere at South Coast Rep, was the off-Broadway playwright debut of Sarah Treem, a very young (27) graduate of the same Yale program that produced Wendy Wasserstein. While Treem matches and exceeds the pioneering redhead’s ability with one-liners and covers some of her signature territory—balancing career and self in an openly patriarchal world—she also runs into the same irksome artificiality that plagues Wassersein’s plays. Both writers have trouble creating characters with distinct voices, and some scenes read more like a personal essay than conversation. Treem has youth on her side, though, and this play is good enough to expect she’ll learn from her predecessor’s mistakes.
Taken on its own terms, A Feminine Ending is a perfectly enjoyable comedy, and this production really succeeds thanks to the work of the ensemble. While Bloom’s performance is the most impressive and effective (those hands again!), the funniest lines all come from McLean, who tempers her usual borderline insanity with a deep sympathy for a woman made batty by domesticity.
RECENT COMMENTS ON “A Feminine Ending (Portland Center Stage)”
I give the actors and director high marks for an excellent performance. The play itself, however, I would not rate very well. Although many of the lines were amusing, the story itself was very predict...











