Review: Strawberry Theatre Workshop's WHY WE HAVE A BODY a Head-Scratcher

Everyone has memories that feel rife with significance, but said significance does not necessarily make sense to others. And if the best depiction of said memory is beyond traditional language, then playwrights like Claire Chafee use poetic language to communicate said significance. In Chafee's "Why We Have a Body", four women tell their stories in a series of vignettes and monologues using poetic language, and yet any significance Chafee is trying to communicate gets lost in translation.

The story centers around Lili, a hard-boiled private investigator whose criminal/schizophrenic sister, Mary (Katya Landau), has broken out of jail, again. Lili (Alyssa Keene) welcomes Mary into her home, and the two of them separately muse upon significant women, both fictional and real, in their life.

Strawberry Theatre Workshop takes a stab at this fragmented memory play admirably. The show has a cast of folks with a can-do attitude, each bringing the strange, unspeakable layer to the characters that make them feel like memories. Katya Landau's Mary is manic, mumbly, and means well. Her obsession with Joan of Arc is endearing and cool, and as is how clearly she cherishes her relationship with Lili. Eleanor (Amy Fleetwood), a seasoned explorer, chimes in sporadically to spout outdated views about homosexuality and wax poetic about nature.

It was so hard to care about these characters, or the circumstances, because no moment was given enough time to really gain traction. Much of the dialogue was too unnecessarily heady, and nothing any of the characters did made sense. Lili is a private investigator, who, upon learning that her schizophrenic sister broke out of jail, told her to move in with her. Not to turn herself in, but to add more criminal offenses to her record and to make herself, Lili, a criminal by default. Without the bat of an eye, Lili, who holds herself with an air of dignity and professionalism, immediately does something too crazy to make her sympathetic. And she's sold as this even-keeled character, but that decision to casually harbor an escaped convict is so unfathomable and uncharacteristic. And nobody was holding a gun to her head: Lili took Mary in only because, it seems, she's family.

Truly, the cast did their best with this very difficult material. Landau was the standout performance of the evening, helped by the nature of her character being the easiest to buy in to. When a woman with schizophrenia rambles about Joan of Arc, and says that her favorite bar is one in an airport, audiences can say yes to that, because her character is supposed to be crazy. So, it's okay that she talks like a crazy person. But it doesn't quite fit that all of the characters talk like crazy people. Eleanor can get away with it, a bit, because it seems like she's been exploring in the wild solo for a while. Renee (Lili's academic love-interest [played by Mahria Zook]) and Lili have no excuse for their heady, complicated language. Plus, when the scene is supposed to be a conversation, rather than a monologue, no one character anchors the conversation, so it feels like people having two different conversations. The women will speak to one another like they're in a strange dream. Sometimes, it sounds like they're reading directly from the Sylvia Plath Wikipedia page. Other times, they use cryptic language that (given how unnecessary it is) simply feels off-putting. For example, Lili brings up a memory of Mary putting on her bathing suit and wearing it in the car on the drive to the beach. Mary explained that she liked doing it because it was like she was already on vacation, to which Lili accuses Mary of being "incapable of metaphor". What does that mean exactly? I'm lost.

The audio cues were really poorly timed: a new scene would start before the sound effects ended, so Eleanor would be talking about playing in a stream with loud car sounds playing in the background. Sometimes, an audio track that lingered into the following scene would be suddenly shut off, without a transition from ambient noise to silence. These technical issues are ultimately forgivable, and could be chalked up to an off-night. The disjointed dialogue is less so. Unfortunately for the talented actors, these are good actors wasted on a jumbled script.

For doing a decent job with a bad show, I give Strawberry Theatre Workshop's "Why We Have a Body" a frustrated C-.

"Why We Have a Body" performs at 12th Ave Arts through October 14, 2017. For tickets and information, visit them online at www.strawbshop.org.

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