INDEPENDENCE
The obvious solution–get away before the damage sinks in for good (and evil). That’s the fight-or-flight option facing the three Briggs girls in Lee Blessing’s well-named Independence, a play about breaking away from Mom and Independence, Iowa. The eldest daughter has already flown this cuckoo’s nest: after a four-year absence, Kess, now a Minneapolis music historian living with her lover Susan, returns home because she has just learned that her mother Evelyn almost killed her sister Jo. (Kess had provided similar crisis management when the mother had to be temporarily committed.)
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Sandra Grand’s Footsteps Theatre Company staging mines a bit less from the script than it could, mainly because Carol Whelan’s Evelyn doesn’t muster the combination of cagey charm and emotional hunger that’s needed to justify the daughters’ dilemmas. Whelan seems more distracted than desperate; it beats doing Joan Crawford, but it doesn’t give the daughters enough to react against.
