REVIEW: COOKING WITH LARD

Southerners are funny, right? Especially Southern women- they're funny and quirky and innocently insightful while never really saying anything intelligent. Right? Right?

Such seems to be the message of Cooking with Lard, a new play by Cindy Hanson and Cheryl Norris that aspires to be the Steel Magnolias for the new millennium, but hasn't the charm, wit, or intelligence of that masterpiece. Worst of all, the play abuses a dire need in the theatre world– the need for plays by women about women's lives.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a Texas diner that serves down-home cookin' alongside down-home philosophy (this is as opposed to Steel Magnolias, which served down-home wisdom in a beauty salon. Southern women seem to have progressed from the parlor to the kitchen. What progress! Sorry, I mean– what progress?). Customers and staff meet and greet and clearly share, if not blood, a strong familial bond. While very little happens plot-wise in the course of the play, we get to see moments in the lives of the many women and girls who frequent this café. This would all be fine, if their stories were interesting, or at least funny. (This is, after all, ostensibly a comedy.) In this day and age, it's rather difficult to find genuine humor based on stereotypes (unless, as in Avenue Q, the humor is based on mocking the stereotype itself), and most of the "jokes" fall frustratingly flat. We (mostly) only see each woman for one scene, and the writing is not strong enough to create three-dimensional characters in a few brief minutes. We understand their prototypes immediately: the worldly-wise cook (feminine version of the worldly-wise bartender?), the crazy activist, the feisty old lady, the restrained old lady, the career woman who's forgotten her roots, the silly teenage girl, the wise-beyond-her-years pre-teen, the maligned housewife... You get the picture. We've seen all of these characters before, and Hanson and Norris do very little to flesh out the two-dimensional figures.

To be fair, though, there are some stronger moments in the play that mix strong acting with good writing. At the end of Act 1, for example, a young lawyer stops by the diner and runs into an old teacher of hers, learning some secrets from her high-school days that had been kept from her for years. The conversation, and the characters, are refreshingly vivid– had the rest of the play been as interesting and intelligent as that brief scene, it could have held my interest throughout. Unfortunately, it wasn't, and it didn't.

The many characters are played by four actresses, all of whom must do many quick costume changes in between scenes The device backfires, making the characters confusing and the switches distracting, especially when the grown women play young children or teenagers. (The show would have been stronger with a larger cast.) The actresses try to make the many "personalities" they must embody unique, but it's a hard trick when there are very few defining characteristics in the script. The most successful of the four is Lorrie Harrison, who plays a snotty teenager, a nostalgic lawyer, and a radical vegetarian with equal aplomb, finding the heart in most of her characters. The other actresses have some fine moments, too: as the retired teacher, Cindy Hanson exhibits a very nice joie de vivre; Kathryn Dickinson finds strength in the pain of an unhappy housewife; Bijou Clinger does her strongest work as the gentle manager and cook of the diner. There is an old expression, of course, about silk purses and sows' ears, so no matter how talented these four performers are, they cannot get around the inherent weakness of the script.

As I mentioned above, there is a dire need for plays about women and women's lives. Of course, if we are to ever make progress and reach true equality, the plays must be more than a perpetuation of stereotypes.