A Feminine Ending (Portland Center Stage)
Adulthood, as it turns out, was overrated.
July 16th, 2008
21A (Arts Equity) | There isn’t much to this magic bus.3 comments
July 16th, 2008
Imani Winds and Roberto Sierra | Classical music without the powdered wigs.0 comments
July 9th, 2008
Northwest Professional Dance Project | On the road to success, eight dancers pull over in Portland.0 comments
July 2nd, 2008
WEB Exclusive • Information Station | Tahni Holt's brainchild Information Studio was a remote-controlled icebreaker.1 comment
July 2nd, 2008
Les Misérables (Broadway Rose) | Can you hear the people sing—in Tigard?4 comments
June 18th, 2008
Agnieszka Laska-Dickson String Quartet | A remarkable family band tackles some serious strings.4 comments
June 4th, 2008
From a Dream to a Dream (Hand2mouth) | So a Polish theater company walks into Artists Rep...0 comments
May 28th, 2008
Fanfare For The Fallen | Trumpeter turns to Copland for China quake relief.0 comments
May 7th, 2008
4x4: The Ballet Project (White Bird) | Four on the floor: All ballet, all night long.0 comments
May 7th, 2008
Spring Awakenings | It’s May! The sun is out! Bring on the homoerotic turmoil!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.
Story continues below
advertisement
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.
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 predictable and, in the end, marginalized by the use of several writing devices that neither added tension or character interest. I felt that this was a play in it’s toddler stages. The playwright obviously wants to say something important about women and career, and mothers and daughters, but the characters themselves did not seem flushed out enough in the author’s mind to give the audience a palpable sense of their inner struggle. Even the main character, though a good actress, did little to convince me that her chosen career - being a composer — was all that very important to her, or even that she had a great deal of talent. I was told of her struggle to achieve and her fear (unfortunately through the recounting of a dream sequence) but I was not shown that emotional conflict. I was told she loved her boyfriend, but I felt not any emotional loss or grief associated with the character’s choices. I was told a great many things (another devise: the playwright resorted to using the audience as a foil) but I was rarely shown the emotional world that lay beneath her soliloquys. I found elements of the play, the mother’s panties for example, lacking character motivation or incongruent with the character as presented. In other words, an interesting prop with no true purpose. I also found the playwright’s determination to and method of resolving the majority of conflicts trite and unsatisfying. In all I would give the play a 3 out of 10.