Review: SATURDAY NIGHT/SUNDAY MORNING: Women's War Stories

Saturday Night/Sunday Morning

Written by Katori Hall, Directed by Dawn M. Simmons; Scenic Design, Mac Young; Costume Design, Elisabetta Polito; Lighting Design, Ian W. King; Sound Design, Kelsey Jarboe; Assistant Director, Tonasia Jones; Dialect Coach, Bryn Austin; Dramaturg, Ciera-Sadé Wade; Production Stage Manager, Julien Winter Tremblay; Assistant Stage Manager, Michaela Brown

CAST (in alphabetical order): Ramona Lisa Alexander, Jackie Davis, Meagan Dilworth, Jade Guerra, Cloteal L. Horne, Tasia A. Jones, Keith Mascoll, Omar Robinson, Jasmine Rush

Performances through November 21 at Lyric Stage Company, 140 Clarendon Street, Boston, MA; Box Office 617-585-5678 or www.lyricstage.com

Step into another world and another time at the Lyric Stage Company production of Saturday Night/Sunday Morning, a lively play about seven African-American women awaiting the end of World War II in a Memphis beauty parlor/boarding house. You can almost smell the pomade and feel the heat of the hot comb as the proprietress of Miss Mary's Press 'n' Curl goes about her business, tending to the needs of her clientele and juggling the wounded psyches of her boarders. Playwright Katori Hall draws distinctive characters who are fully realized by this ensemble of wonderful actors under the direction of Dawn M. Simmons.

Miss Mary (Jasmine Rush) is a no-nonsense war widow whose financial survival is augmented by the paltry payments from the sisterhood of boarders residing under her roof. She runs a tight ship, but dishes out life lessons along with a hot breakfast, and Rush captures both her edge and her warmth. The denizens include sassy and flirtatious Mabel (Cloteal L. Horne), whose husband is overseas, her mouthy kid sister Taffy (Meagan Dilworth), and languorous Leanne (Jade Guerra), who mopes around the house and succumbs to frequent crying jags when she thinks that the absence of letters from her boyfriend Bobby (Omar Robinson) might mean he's been killed in action. Dot (Ramona Lisa Alexander) and Jackie (Jackie Davis) are like a Greek chorus, regular customers of the salon who come in as much for the gossip as for a shampoo and set.

Starved as they are for male companionship, the women perk up for the daily visits of the mail carrier Buzz (Keith Mascoll) whose bum leg has kept him home from the war. He pays special attention to Leanne, but she is only interested in the contents of his pouch which has held nothing for her for four years. Nothing much changes at Miss Mary's until a newcomer named Gladys (Tasia A. Jones) arrives from Birmingham, typewriter in hand, looking for a room and a fresh start as a writer. Although the house is full, Leanne offers to let Gladys share her room and bed and the two become fast friends. Gladys also becomes a key player in a scheme devised by Mabel and Taffy to lift the pall surrounding Leanne, but none of them foresees the consequences.

Saturday Night/Sunday Morning is a little bit melodrama, a little bit soap opera, but its strength is in showing a slice of life with authenticity, empathy, and humor. Hall has a marvelous ear for dialogue and the cadence of the women's conversations moves the story at a brisk pace. Their thick accents and their rapid-fire banter take a little getting used to, but the flavor of 1945 Memphis comes through loud and clear. The first act is dense with exposition and character development, but it leads to more refined plot points and greater emotional connections in act two. There are a couple of things that Hall foreshadows rather heavy-handedly, dulling their impact when they are revealed, but the actors play it straight and do their best to maintain an element of surprise. When all of the threads are woven together by the end of the play, none of the characters is unchanged and all are facing a future different than they had expected.

Elisabetta Polito extends her run of creating outstanding costume designs (City of Angels, Into the Woods), finding just the right look for each of the characters while being true to the period. Miss Mary's salon is artfully conceptualized by scenic designer Mac Young, with the shop on the ground level and an upper tier showing the dramatic goings-on in Leanne's boudoir. Ian W. King's lighting design defines scenes by time of day or night, as well as segregating fantasy from reality by use of spotlights and shadows. The sounds of 1940's radio, rain and thunder, and street noises are clear in Kelsey Jarboe's design, and credit Bryn Austin for coaching the cast to achieve their authentic-sounding dialects.

In her introduction to Saturday Night/Sunday Morning, the playwright pays homage to the real life Miss Mary whose beauty shop/boarding house was across the street from her grandmother. She says the shop transformed so many; "it was a place of solace and sisterhood, growth, and spirit." With the characters she creates and the stories she tells, Hall has opened a window into a world that is so familiar to African-American women, but that many of us have not visited. The Lyric Stage Company's production gets it right and allows us to virtually share the experience.

Photo credit: Glenn Perry (Tasia A. Jones, Meagan Dilworth, Cloteal L. Horne, Jade Guerra, Jasmine Rush, Keith Mascoll)

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