Review: Lady M at FronteraFest [theater]

Lady M Candle Poster.jpg Reworkings of classic text from an avenging feminist playwright's view have become a popular sub-genre and, as with any socio-political artform, must be continuously guarded against gallivanting headlong into the snaggled, flapping maw of Becoming Cliche and Disenfranchising. Add to that the apex stakes for anyone attempting to make a sympathetic character of one of drama's most notorious viragoes, and you've got a task on your hands. The "cruel victim of a cruel world" angle can still work in a feminist structure, but when handled with such fumbling hands it alienates rather than endorses empathy. Melissa Rodriguez's Lady M is a mass of wooden, splintered performances batted about by a director kicking to stay afloat on the surface of a stagnant dialogue pond.

Lady Gruoch (pronounced Groak) hangs out with her maid, Canna, and some crazy hoo-doo woman named something like Gerbil (there were no character/ actor names in the program) under the rueful eye of her megalomaniacal, mercenary father who arranges for her to marry Macbeth after manipulating him in to killing her husband that she kinda loved a few days prior (requisite behavior for power-hungry back-in-the-day dudes). Then she and the maid, at the fervent behest of Gerbil, decide to jet off to avoid Gruoch's "fire and blood" fate that's kinda inevitable, and Daddy retaliates by killing the maid (after a You-Can-Take-My-Body-But-Never-My-Heart diatribe) and, just for fun, her baby. Gruoch is plunged into this vengeful pain realm and ends up, in Greek tragic fashion, wedged in to a fate that she had the notion she could thwart.

The treatment of themes was, on all fronts, deleterious. Ham-fisted, ardent "you made me like this" arguments better left in the 70's were dragged out to hobble through the proceedings, directed absently and as if by rubric. Most actors flicked the soft chunks of romance-novel dialogue absently with their tongues like spinach in the teeth and moved little, as if they were thinking of ways to get out of a bad date. Only the actresses playing Canna and Sounds-Like-Gerbil actually made their stage business their own with an obvious effort to engage and pull this piece out of the murk. Like those of their characters, however, their protests were bound to be muffled and ineffectual. Lady M, like it's title character, wasn't doomed invariably, but it's situation made it's prodigious challenges almost insurmountable from the start.

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