THE WEIRDLY SISTERS
The Weirdly Sisters is a combination adventure story and psychodrama. At its most basic level, the play deals with a neglectful mother’s difficult relationship with her two daughters. The mother has to deal with her feelings of failure and ambivalence toward her offspring, while the daughters find different methods of coping with their feelings of abandonment.
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But the story itself is anything but simple. It’s set in a fantastical world, where the powerful sorcerer Esoterator (“Messer With the Universe”) has a plan to draw the distracted mother, Eme (pronounced “ee-mee”) Weirdly, completely into his world of academic abstraction. Esoterator, who gets his power through books and jism, is aided in his scheme by his personal stupid but lethal assistant Gunface, who is just what his name implies. Since in his abstract world there is no emotional contact, Esoterator must eliminate Eme’s two daughters Moxie and Loney in order to achieve his goal; tenuous as it is, they represent the only remaining personal attachment the super-intellectual Eme has to the real world.
First of all, while that’s a valid and noble message, it’s a trifle sentimental, considering the wild machinations we have to go through to get to it. Second, when Magnus starts to wind down to that point, his humor simply vanishes, and in its place are long, pseudointellectual tracts about motherhood and the meaning of life.
