A woman sits at a desk in a home office, engaged in reading. Another woman silently approaches the stage and walks into the office. How can the reading woman not know someone’s there? Is it a ghost? A memory?
This is the opening of The How and the Why. The second woman turns out to have been invited. Zelda (Amy Loui) was so engrossed in reading she didn’t realize the guest had gotten all the way in without being heard. She's Rachel (Sophia Brown). Zelda is a big-deal research biologist, and we learn Rachel is the daughter she gave up for adoption 28 years ago. Rachel, in fact, is a research biologist, too, looking to present her findings at an annual international conference. The conference turned down her paper. Zelda is a honcho with the group that runs the conference.
You think you see where this is going? Well, no, not exactly. It’s a series of slow reveals. There’s always more to learn in this story of a birth mother and the extremely prickly daughter who’s found her. On the one hand, there’s an element of soap opera to the tale. And yet some things are well handled, like the fiery politics of scientific research. (Immense egos are not restricted to show business and politicians, believe me.) The story manages to avoid a lot of the expected cliches like the rush of maternal love that could show itself perhaps 20 minutes into the play.
Zelda’s love is her work. It’s the breath of life, the intellectual food on which she is nourished. Personal relations? Not so much. Rachel, slow to reveal herself but never hesitant to snarl, is hardly still a moment, pacing, stiffening, expounding and clearly wound up. Like many people who live the life of competitive intellectual rigor in academia, she’s socially less advanced than some her age. It’s a quality that doesn’t work to her advantage.
Her irritable pushiness, it could be argued, comes from the question so many adoptees ask: Why did you give me up? But I would argue for something beyond that. We know that personality comes from more than our environment, that there are also elements of physical heredity in it as well. I think it’s Zelda – and perhaps her genetic father as well – coming out in her, just in a different way.
Is the story full of just too many coincidences? That’s your call. But it’s beautifully acted, both women strong and full of emotion, some of which is controlled and some of which can’t be. Nancy Bell has combined things very well, calling int alents like Peter and Margery Spack’s set and Felia Davenport’s costumes, Michael Sullivan’s lights and Zoe Sullivan’s sound.
I freely acknowledge that for personal reasons, I’m probably a little too close to see the forest for the trees in this show, but for good acting and a pay-attention-and-follow-the-plot story, this is for you.
The How and the Why
through February 11, 2018
The New Jewish Theatre
The Wool Family Studio
Jewish Community Center Staenberg Family Complex
2 Millstone Campus Drive, Creve Coeur
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