The O'Conner Girls: Turbulent fun for Guilty Catholics
The O'Conner Girls: Turbulent fun for Guilty Catholics
Finding common ground with your family usually goes through a turbulent series of trials and errors, frequently including a big mess to mop up. Take Kate Forgette’s play The O’Conner Girls, running at Park Square Theatre 9-22 thru 10-15. Two sisters have never been close with their Dad. A dirty build up of confrontation plays out with their mother in the family home while sorting through Daddy’s belongings after his funeral. A toxic environment now ripe for sweeping up the din of family denial and accusation follows.
Liz O’Conner (superbly crafty Melinda Kordich), a blunt acid-tongued fading beauty with three failed marriages thinks she’ll whisk through her estranged dad’s funeral in a quick in-out fashion. Her doting sister Martha (a wistfully repressive Colleen Hennen) desperately needs a vacation from doggedly nursing her ailing father and absent minded mother. The matriarch, Sarah O’Conner, despite questionable Alzheimer’s implications, plans to move on and out of their cherished nesting place. Linda Kelsey’s performance delivers a winning study of nuanced movement and fortitude portraying this 64 year old mother who is slowing down in her years but not in spunk.
SJA’s own Nancy Gormley cuts up hysterically as the meddling Aunt Margie, in the know with all of the family’s business before it even happens. Determined to land Martha a husband and bring distanced Liz closer to her mother, Gormley’s Margie ekes out just the wrong thing to say at the most opportune time to advance her causes. “Food is good for a hangover,” she wheedles a hung over Liz with some breakfast, “Ask any drunk.”
A tug of war between evading and handling responsibility becomes a test for these two sparring sisters who really do care for one another. Liz, the cool quipster, waxes the heated talk of their repressed Catholic upbringing under the watchful tutelage of Nuns: “She was like Stalin in a Nun’s habit.” But Liz’s incendiary remarks build to a fevered pitch of cruelty that vexes her sister and causes her mother to walk away. Coming home for Liz is an unbearable burden riddled with Catholic guilt. For home body Martha, leaving her family would be a betrayal steeped with Catholic guilt.
The two play out a childhood game where they act out the plots of vintage films and fawn over the charms of the great leading men from A Place in the Sun, In Name Only and Dark Victory. This game snares their alluring childhood friend and now Doctor, David Stevens (affably compelling Gary Keast) into a competition for affection between the two sisters.
Michael Hoover’s set recreates the fuzzy warm interior of a good old fashioned Catholic home with the Virgin Mary statue adorning a foyer. Elin Anderson’s costumes offer an effectively dark color palette capturing the mournful, hostile and repressive nature of the characters. Only Gormley is allowed a little color, some purple, to compliment her dotty persona. Mary Finnerty’s assured direction brings only the best from a sharply well cast production. Kate Forgette’s script, at times predictable and anticlimactic, but filled with witty aphorisms and well drawn characters, is reinforced by Finnerty’s watchful eye that smartly avoids sentiment in favor of keenly acted performances who gamely tackle confrontation in a clipping pace.
The O’Conner Girls
Written by Kate Forgette. Directed by Mary Finnerty.
7:30 p.m. Thu.-Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Ends Oct. 15
Park Square Theatre, 20 W. 7th Pl., St. Paul, MN
Tickets: $32-$35. 651-291-7005.
Web: www.parksquaretheatre.org.