Totaled
Renewed interest in Big and Little Edie Beale is not well served by the fictionalized "exploration" A Few Small Repairs.
Renewed interest in Big and Little Edie Beale — wealthy relations of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis whose 1970s descent into poverty is chronicled in the documentary film Grey Gardens, plus a hit musical and planned biopic of the same name — is not well served by playwright David Robson's fictionalized "exploration" A Few Small Repairs.
Robson's sketchy constructs, renamed mother and daughter Big and Little Alice (perhaps an homage to Edward Albee's Tiny Alice?), flail about in an absurdist first act revealing that they're delusional, living in filth and fantasy in their decrepit Newport, R.I., mansion, and not particularly interesting. (Madness might be fun for actors to play, but it's not nearly so fun to watch.)
The Wilmington, Del., playwright crams what little action he can conjure into Act II, arranging a thin scheme by a local Snidely Whiplash to condemn their home, flashing back to an overly simple, soap-opera excuse for their mental decay (yikes, it's sex — kinda-sorta, anyway), and stitching on a deus ex machina finale that leaves both Big and Little unchanged and unsaved.
What remains unclear is what Robson saw in this situation, and what he wants us to glean from it. We eventually feel pity both for childlike Big Alice and manic Little Alice, whose brief glimpse of her lost potential provides the play's one burst of human feeling in Sonja Robson's powerfully sincere performance. What else occurs, however, adds up to little: Some men feel pity for the women, but recoil from their childlike ignorance of their filthy squalor. No one's willing to plunge in and help, except conveniently rich, distant relatives, and the play's final moment implies that they'll run in horror, too. Is that really an insight?
Working hard through the murk are Hazel Bowers as Big Alice; Arnold Kendall, her fantasy of the husband who deserted her decades ago; Foster Cronin as the young handyman briefly smitten with Little Alice; and Gene D'Alessandro, Jerry Puma and Len Webb in well-acted functionary roles, directed by William Roudebush.
Seasoned pros all, they cannot rescue A Few Small Repairs, which does little to illuminate or explain — let alone satisfyingly resolve — the Beales' sad predicament. Fiction should do something.
A Few Small Repairs, Through April 22, Painted Bird Productions, Second Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-563-4330.
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