BWW Reviews: CROOKED - A Clear-Eyed Look at Adolescence

When you're fourteen, you are a mass of contradictions, fueled by hormones, junk food, and confusion. You hate your parents, but you also need them, and you hate yourself for needing them. You're jealous of everyone around you. And you most likely have no idea what sex and dating are about, but you're starting to notice boys or girls and you're not sure what that means. All you know is that you're frustrated, and you're going to take that out on everyone around you.

Catherine Treischmann's play Crooked, now playing at CoHo Productions, is about a fourteen-year-old girl named Laney who is even more confused and angry than most kids her age. She and her mother, Elise, have just moved from Wisconsin to Elise's hometown in Mississippi. Dad is out of the picture for reasons that only gradually become clear. Laney reads prodigiously and writes short, violent stories that give Elise cause for concern. Stress has caused Laney to walk hunched over, one shoulder higher than the other. She's confused about sex and literature, and she's embarrassed by her mother.

Elise is a rational list-making person who finds Laney's constant drama exhausting. She's trying to pull her own life together but can't stop to catch her breath. Things get more complicated when Laney makes a friend, sixteen-year-old Maribel, who comes from a religious, home-schooled background. She's ripe for whatever wild stories Laney wants to tell, and she becomes fascinated with Elise's directness and honesty.

These three women are all complex and fascinating creatures, and Crooked gives us a rounded picture of each of them. Kayla Lian has the trickiest role as Laney, and she's endlessly inventive, embodying the passion of a teenager without becoming wearying, and showing the fear underneath the character's bravado. Maureen Porter's Elise starts out as a level-headed mom, but we see her exhaustion and loneliness as the play goes by. Meghan Chambers makes Maribel funny but never simple, and over the course of the play we come to admire her sweetness.

It's a short play, on one basic set with a couple of small inserts, and the writing is so strong and the cast so capable that director Phillip Cuomo could perhaps have taken a nap and let the actresses do all the work. But he's clearly given them a lot of inspiration. The cast remains in character even in the between-scene transitions when they're moving props and adding or removing costume pieces. The little details, like the characters removing their shoes when they come into Elise's house, add to the believability of the performance.

I loved this play, but I don't want to overpraise Crooked or make it sound dark and difficult. It's a wonderful slice of life and a reminder of the rough moments we all experience in our adolescence. After a while you feel like you're eavesdropping on the family next door, and that's a good thing; there are plenty of laughs, but this isn't a sitcom If you were ever fourteen, go see it.

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