Review: THE YEARS at The Chapel

When families experience disappointment, pain, divorce, assault, victimization and death, life’s struggles can often be made easier with the support of extended family members. Upon initial examination, Cindy Lou Johnson’s play THE YEARS seems like a simple telling of a series of upsetting life events that are experienced by three women over a 17-year period. This play has often been criticized as a work with weak dramatic arc and characters who aren’t fully developed. But that argument minimizes the strength that each of these women provide one another through encouragement, concern, care, and compassion. It’s that support network that bestows the mechanism to not only cope, but to thrive while overcoming grief and sorrow while learning to forgive and let go.

Sisters Andrea (Alicen Moser) and Eloise (Summer Baer), and their first cousin Isabella (Ashley Bauman) are the trio of women who help one another cope with the hardships that life throws at them. Moser, Baer and Bauman access their character’s genuine feelings by tapping into the character’s emotional state. Each of the three actors realistically convey their character's anger, love, sadness, fear and joy. It is in each of their emotional performances that make The Midnight Company’s production of THE YEARS compelling. There is such realness in their performances that the audience senses their familial ties.

Joe Hanrahan strength as a director is grounded in his competence for telling convincing stories. In this production of THE YEARS, he helps his actors mine the text to identify each character’s truth. He relies on Johnson’s story and trusts the in the skills of each of his gifted actors. Hanrahan recognizes that it’s the interrelationships that drive this character driven story and he places the entire production on the back of his talented young cast.

While THE YEARS deals with heartbreaking, painful and difficult subject matter, it is not a grim play. The Midnight Company’s production is a moving story of how people can rise above their personal ordeals when they are supported by loving relationships.  

The Midnight Company’s production of The Years will run though July 29th at The Chapel located at 6328 Alexander in St. Louis.

PHOTO CREDIT: Joey Rumpell

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