Review: THE WOMEN OF CEDAR CREEK Dismantle with Great Care

Deep in Texas, the Montgomery women of Cedar Creek come together to empty their ancestral home of their ailing mother's belongings before selling the property to developers. In Catherine Ann Jones's play about the family dynamics of mourning, the three daughters of Cedar Creek, each with a unique relationship to their remembered childhood, navigate the distressing transition of relocating their mother, who suffers from escalating dementia, out of the family home.

Though billed as a comedy/drama, the humor in The Women of Cedar Creek is an incidental byproduct of dysfunctional family interactions rather than comedic writing. The Women of Cedar Creek is, in fact, a very earnest drama about the inability to preserve a vanishing era of family history. Montgomery matriarch Dollie Mae (Melinda Yohe) serves as a literal example of this concept with her inconsistent recall capacity. Her daughters, Lynda Lee (Amber Shannon), Jolene (Lisa Smith), and Bobbie (Sherri Mendenhall), struggle to find a future for their mother and the Cedar Creek property that they can agree on as they wrap, box, and catalog the artifacts from their childhood. The women of Cedar Creek give the audience a lesson in bereavement, the realization of mortality, and the consequences of addressing the skeletons in the closet. The ghosts that haunt us aren't in the walls, Jones reminds us; they are inside of us, and we carry them wherever we go.

Director Jordana Lawrence applies a gentle touch to her production of The Women of Cedar Creek. The characters are understandably raw as they sever their life-long relationship with their childhood home. Dollie Mae, who vacillates between mental clarity and dementia-induces muddled memory, is a character both frustrating and sympathetic. Her daughters react to her inability to remember their names or consistently understand her shifting situation with a convincing emotional jumble of annoyance, sadness, and patient generosity. This play is a character-based piece focused on family dynamics rather than narrative arc, and the tension builds as the proud Montgomery women's ability to maintain composure festers into haphazard attempts to redirect their pain by dredging the river of the past for judgments about each others' lifestyle choices.

Production-wise, The Women of Cedar Creek was enjoyable and thought provoking, though pacing was somewhat slow moving due to an overabundance of conversational text. Without need for a strong, point-by-point linear narrative (the play is, essentially, a multifaceted discussion regarding one life-changing event), the characters were apt to lean too heavily on personal bickering and repetitive chattiness that did little to add to story or characterization. However, the characters, including the sassy-but-loyal housekeeper, Crystal (Teresa Washington), and Bobbie's thoroughly modern daughter, Lizzie (Shari Howard), are likeable and intriguing; and their situation is accessible and relatable. While certain moments of the play languished in repetitive banter that could have been edited down for more potent storytelling, the loquacious tendencies of the characters didn't detract terribly from the main points of tension between family members.

The Women of Cedar Creek is a slow burn of the perplexity of anticipatory grief when the loss of a family member becomes impending. A touching portrayal of familial defeat and support, what The Women of Cedar Creek lacks in concentration of powerful dialogue, it makes up for in strength, constancy, and variation of character turmoil.

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