BETWEEN DAYLIGHT AND BOONVILLE
Of course, Williams has set himself a difficult task: to write an accurate, interesting slice of life set in the coal-mining region of southern Indiana. He focuses on three frustrated miners’ wives, who wait at home, raising the kids and trying to keep their sanity by gabbing the day away. Williams’s choice of details feels right–the magazines the women read (supermarket tabloids), the things they talk about (television, their husbands, their inchoate sense of being stifled living in the middle of nowhere), even the way they keep one ear vigilantly cocked for explosions coming from the nearby strip mine.
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Laura Scariano as Carla, the edgy, unfulfilled woman ready to run off if only she had more than $38 saved up, seems inhibited and self-conscious in comparison with her fellow players. Throughout her many long speeches about how unhappy she is living in the middle of nowhere, Scariano never manages to convince us that she has any emotional investment in what she’s saying. In fact, Scariano keeps allowing herself to be caught in the act of acting. Sometimes you can actually see her thinking about her next move onstage, which slows down the action of a show that’s already slow and makes her lines unbelievable. By the time she’s finished speaking, you’ve forgotten what she was trying to say.
