What
do you do when you lose your one true love?
With
five well-defined female characters (plus two goofy men), a soundtrack of
cuddly Beatles tunes, and the plot of a Lifetime channel movie, To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday, performed
last weekend by Soulstice Theatre, has all the elements of a perfect chick
play.
David,
a former college teacher, has been living in an island cottage purchased with
the settlement from his wife’s tragic demise two years ago. He’s in a state of
arrested life, spending his days running on the beach and his nights conversing
with the stars—and the tangible ghost of Gillian, said former wife—and his
sixteen-year-old daughter Rachel is forced to take up the slack. When Dave’s
family conspires to bring an attractive friend who’s “in the man-market,”
inconveniently forgetting that it’s the day of the play’s title, tempers fray,
harsh words are exchanged; followed, as day follows night, by earnest talks on
the beach, changes of heart, and reconciliations. Wisdom is found where it
always is—right where we forgot to look.
The
script is flawed by overly glib banter (“Your favorite state is denial”). The
workmanlike set sorely needs some humanizing touches. Not all of the actors
command the subtlety needed to delineate their characters’ rapid emotional
changes; we understand, rather than see, that the characters are masking their
grief and fear behind wisecracks and trivia. Eventually, however, the players
generate warmth and light: Jillian Smith as Gillian’s sister does an admirable
job cutting through David’s crap; Amber Page is warm and genuine as the good
woman who we know can entice him out of his cocoon and back into messy real
life.
It’s
no coincidence that Soulstice Theatre is presently mourning the untimely loss
of a beloved founding member, Keith Tamsett; this play was their purifying
rite, to bring themselves—and us—to the moment of accepting that the nearer our
destination, the more we’re slip-slidin’ away.
Runs through May 24 at the
