Review: Verge Theater Company's Beautifully Acted SKINLESS

Johnna Adams is a consummate storyteller: employing fantasy and fiction, conjecture and supposition, she weaves together a tale that is at once intensely intriguing and enormously off-putting, using her skill as a writer to transport her audience to an otherworldly place that exists only in her imagination and, perhaps, in the woods and hollows of north Georgia.

With her script for Skinless - the "pulp fiction" she's created to explore the roles of women now and in the mid-20th century - Adams proves her mettle by creating a work that is guaranteed to elicit discussion and provoke conversations of the sort that accompany any play that may be considered controversial and unlike anything you've seen before. But Skinless really isn't that different from a lot of what we Southerners have long considered our bailiwick: it's dark and gothic, sure, but it's also lighthearted and fanciful at moments. It juxtaposes horrific images against the bucolic backdrop of the natural beauty of the deep, dark woods - where danger lurks around that tree over there and where adventure awaits down that path. The sky above may be an azure blue, but in that ditch over there one might find the dead and lifeless body of...well, whatever, one might imagine.

But Adams' Skinless lacks the subtle yet horrifying beauty of Flannery O'Connor's world or the laconic grace of a Eudora Welty story, her characters lacking the dreamlike aura of a clan created by William Faulkner. Instead, Adams' story is heavy-handed and pretentiously arch: Her characters seem cobbled together by committee rather than by inspiration or suggestion drawn from real life.

Beautifully acted by an ensemble of Nashville's finest actors, under the taut and focused direction of David Ian Lee, Johnna Adams' Skinless helps to cement the role of the relatively new Verge Theater Company in the firmament of Nashville's theater community, and represents an unbridled view of what theater can become when freed from commonplace restraints and mundane pursuits. Even if you don't appreciate Skinless - it tells an amazing tale, to be certain, but it flouts theatrical convention in such a way that it undercuts Adams' undisguised aims to the detriment of her script.

Clearly, Adams knows how to spin a tale that will leave you at least momentarily breathless, completely caught up in the fiction she creates - and that's certainly something noteworthy in this day and age and something which makes Skinless such an attraction for audiences yearning for theater beyond the usual offerings. But the show's centerpiece (a pulp novel written in 1954 by a young Georgian woman named Zinnia Wells) is presented as a reading by the author, in the context of sharing the tale with her sisters, each of whom is something of a Southern gothic archetype.

Older sister Marigold (played convincingly by Becky Wahlstrom) is the stalwart family retainer, sister Chryssie (the sinister and off-putting Taylor Chew) is a Boo Radley-esque figure of few words and mysterious mien, and younger sister Bluebell (Alexandra Chopson gives an exhilarating performance as the adolescent sister) is hopeful and unspoiled by the family chiffarobe-full set of secrets and unspoken truths. Finally, Zinnia (once again, Brooke Gronemeyer shows off her amazing range with another startling turn onstage) is a backwoods savant, spinning fantastical tales that defy description and hold her sisters rapt by the power of her words and the mind-pictures she creates with her stories.

Skinless - set in Georgia in the present and in 1954 - tells the story of a young graduate student bent on doing her dissertation on a little-known writer named Zinnia Wells, whose particular brand of writing is represented by one slender volume in which she relates the tale of a tribe of people who shed their skin to live a life somehow freer and more open to possibilities than their normal counterparts, even while it's filled with the pain and horror of unrelenting deprivation and the lack of humanity.

Allie Huff convincingly plays Emmi, that young graduate student battling her professor (played authoritatively by Wesley Paine) for permission to pursue her dissertation on the life and times of Zinnia, the virtually unknown writer who created the horror story of Skinless back in the 1950s. Their scenes together allow Adams to express her feelings on feminism in both the 20th and 21st centuries in ways far more didactic and manipulative than inspiring and enlightening.

However, Lee's direction is so exquisitely focused on bringing the tale to life - and his actors so committed to their interpretations of their characters - that Adams' script is elevated by their actions. Add to that thorough commitment, the richly conceived and authentically realized design aesthetic for the production and it's easy to see why audiences and critics alike have been so rapturous in their praise for Verge Theater Company's Skinless: Jen Kazmierczak's set design is gorgeous, providing the ideal backdrop for the play's action, while Taylor Thomas' lighting design illuminates the play's action to perfection. Caroline Nott's costume design is pitch-perfect and evocative of the characters' time and place, while Eli Van Sickel's sound design provides an ambience that sets the tone for the piece without one false note.

• Skinless. By Johnna Adams. Directed by David Ian Lee. Presented by Verge Theater Company at the Belmont Black Box Theater, Nashville. Running through May 26. Running time: 100 minutes (with no intermission). For details and ticket information, go to www.vergetheaterco.org

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