'The Lady from Dubuque'
By Judith Newmark Post-Dispatch Theater Critic
06/15/2009
The contours of "The Lady from Dubuque" are so familiar to theatergoers that we know where we are right away.
We're at a small party where the hostess behaves badly — a situation that "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" defines. We're among our superficially comfortable countrymen — think of "An American Dream." We need to look hard at familial relationships, which probably aren't what they seem. That's "Three Tall Women" — and just about everything else by the great playwright Edward Albee.
"The Lady from Dubuque" is the second play in Muddy Waters' Albee season. Coincidentally, it runs at the same time that another unfamiliar Albee title, "Everything in the Garden," plays at Stray Dog.
These plays also have a lot in common. Both involve a party gone wrong; both come burdened with long, complicated first acts that need a good whack. And both perk up with the arrival of surprise visitors.
The hostess in "Dubuque," Jo (Sarah Cannon), at least has a good excuse for her rudeness. She's dying of an unspecified, agonizing illness. Her solicitous husband, Sam (Joshua Thomas), has asked in friends to amuse her. But the guests (Patty Ulrich, G. P. Hunsaker, Emily Baker and Todd Pieper) are people Jo never liked much, and she's past keeping up appearances.
The sour mood shifts dangerously with the arrival of Elizabeth (Kirsten Wylder) and Oscar (Robert A. Mitchell). An elegant, intimidating couple, they insist that Elizabeth is Jo's mother.
According to Sam, that's ridiculous. But if she's not, who are they and what have they come for?
This is when the play gets interesting — scary, weirdly comic and, yes, a little heavy-handed with symbolism. "Who they are" is not much of a mystery by the end. But director Cameron Ulrich strives to root the story in a believable, modern world.
He draws strong performances from the whole cast. Wylder and Mitchell make an alluring duo, and Cannon and Thomas are outstanding.
A tiny woman, Cannon lets her size suggest the ravages of illness, turning her into something that looks flammable. And the play's last moments, when Thomas whimpers alone on the stage floor, etch an image of grief so vivid and so intimate that you feel like an intruder just watching him.
If this play offered a simpler, more sentimental account of a couple facing grave illness, we'd recognize their emotional authority at once. The playwright and director, however, don't settle for that kind of shorthand. Instead, they make a smart choice: Set the scene for intelligent performances, and let the actors take it from there.