Southern Exposure

Canadian Judith Thompson’s latest work gets an impressive production in the States.

by Toby Zinman

Perfect Pie

The Wilma Theater, Broad and Spruce Sts., through April 1, 215-546-7824



Girls only: (left to right) Genia Michaela as Young Patsy and Martha Libman as Marie, and (left to right in background) Meg Anderson as Patsy and Elizabeth Hess as Francesca in Perfect Pie.

Filled with the stuff of women’s lives — the remembered ecstasy of girlhood friendship, the baking of pies, the caring for dying mothers, the keeping on keeping on through the children and husbands and kitchens and chores — Perfect Pie is a woman’s play: whether the guys will get it or like it is questionable. It is not a feminist rage play or a soap operatic romance or any of the other easy chick theatricals, but rather an engrossing drama of a woman whose inner life has been locked away ever since something happened: all we know from the early clues is that there was a train and there was an orange flash and there was a coma and that was the last she saw of Marie, her best friend. The unlocking of that memory is the climax of the play.

The action is domestic from the start; Act 1 begins with Patsy rolling out pastry dough as she talks into a tape recorder, speaking a letter: "The reason I am getting in touch with you after all this time, Marie, this thirty some years, is I have been…yearning. To…behold you, I suppose." And behold her she does. Whether Marie actually visits, or whether Patsy is imagining what Marie — now called Francesca — has become (a glamorous, much-married actress), is kept deliberately ambiguous. There is much to suggest both possibilities, just as it is possible that Francesca is Patsy’s fantasized alter-ego: the person she herself might have become had she left home and not chosen the dull normalcy of life on the family farm.

Their conversation tells us not only about the women but about the girls they were and what they remember. As they talk, their younger selves appear and enact the past in rural Ontario, when Marie was the school’s scapegoat — reviled and mocked for poverty and acne and lice — and Patsy was the decent, fun-loving, brave girl who befriended her as they grow from 9-year-olds to teenagers. It is impossible to tell much more of the plot without wrecking the mystery.

Despite the play’s awful title, despite the overlong first act, despite the lack of action, and the sometimes turgid talk about the mundane, the production achieves high theatricality through its staging. As scene seamlessly follows scene, director Blanka Zizka lets out all the stops. The set (designed by Gordana Svilar) gives us both downstairs and upstairs, indoors and outdoors, the house and the barn, as well as now and then, separated by a scrim as subtle as memory. Russell H. Champa’s lighting uses the huge Wilma stage to create immense Canadian skies as well as the lovely path of light Marie walks on into Patsy’s kitchen.

As Patsy, Meg Anderson is very fine: with a voice like a cello and a high, smooth brow, she conveys the complexity of a woman who has made the best of a difficult life and is now "yearning"; her first act’s curtain monologue, explaining how having seizures is like being pursued by a stalker — an essentially feminine image of fear — will probably become one of those permanent fixtures of theatrical auditions. (Worth noting is that the epileptic playwright speaks from experience.) Elizabeth Hess is far less interesting as Francesca — too histrionic, too arm-flailing, too one-dimensional. (This might be defended as the way Patsy would imagine her, although that argument doesn’t make the performance any less annoying.) The two younger actors look astonishingly like their older counterparts, and both Genia Michaela and Martha Libman turn in vivid and poignant performances.

This U.S. premiere is auspicious: Judith Thompson, a playwright well-known in her native Canada, deserves, like her countrywoman Sharon Pollock, more attention down here, and the Wilma has provided an impressive introduction.

Perfect Pie is a play for Girls’ Night Out: Go see it, and leave him home.