LADYHOUSE BLUES
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In Kevin O’Morrison’s Ladyhouse Blues, what doesn’t happen to the characters is what happens in the play. The title says it all: the setting is a “ladyhouse,” a home where four sisters and their widowed mother act out their different blues. It’s a searing hot August in 1919, and the men still haven’t returned from World War I. The Madden women have been transplanted from the farm they dimly remember to a Saint Louis tenement without electricity or a phone. They boil sheets on laundry day, wait for letters from their men, and occasionally take in a silent movie. Surrounded by the sounds of street criers, they’re immured like the daughters in Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba in a bleak neighborhood that seems dead without its menfolk.
To see Ladyhouse Blues is to take a time trip back seven decades. O’Morrison’s play is a richly detailed slice of lost life; like a well-preserved family album, it teems with minutely observed details. The youngest, most hopeful Madden sisters–and the most anxious to leave home–are Eylie and Terry, who are waitresses at a hash house. Eylie, 16, wants to move out to live with her Greek boyfriend, a prizefighter. Terry, the most political of the Maddens, has just been elected a delegate to the World Conference of Working Women in Washington, D.C.
Sincere work comes from Barbara Johnson as the bustling, grumbling, worrying, and–despite everything–fiercely devoted mother, a woman who hides some feelings not at all and others too damn well. Lacking open affection from their mother, the sisters must seek it elsewhere: Emily Hooper as Eylie and Maricela Ochoa as Terry register the hunger of young lives wanting to move on. Because Dot gets only one outburst to suggest her sorrows (a fervent diatribe about life’s lack of purpose), the actress playing her must make that desperation follow from the little we see; but as Salli Richardson plays her, Dot’s far too mellow and content in her prospective motherhood.
