'TRIPTYCH' A PLAY OF DIFFERENT COLORS
by Christine Dolen | MIAMI HERALD
A triptych is a trio of connected paintings, a larger whole made from three distinct parts. In Edna O'Brien's Triptych, the subject of a dramatic portrait is a philandering playwright named Henry.
The women who ''paint'' the portrait, in words full of pain or admiration or desire, are Henry's wife, his daughter and his mistress. Their subject, this man all three love, is the same. But the colors each uses -- here lust, there jealousy -- are very different.
Triptych, one of several plays by Irish novelist O'Brien, premiered four years ago at San Francisco's Magic Theatre. Now Fort Lauderdale's Inside Out Theatre Company is doing it, turning it into a lusty showcase for three fine actresses.
Though the characters are identified by the archetypal ''Mistress,'' ''Wife'' and ''Daughter,'' each does have a name.
Clarissa (Sandra Ives), Henry's current mistress (the latest in a long string), is a British actress working in New York, an elegant and classically trained dame who stars in plays like The Dutchess of Malfi and As You Like It.
Pauline (Lisa Morgan) is Henry's wife, a former actress with a big brain and bigger mouth, a woman who numbs her pain with alcohol but who long ago learned to fight back.
Brandi (Kim Morgan Dean) is the articulate, spoiled teen daughter of Henry and Pauline. She adores her daddy, who gives her sips of his drinks and seems to regard his wandering with bemusement. But in this child of a problematic couple, rebellion is festering.
At the Museum of Art auditorium where Inside Out performs, set designer Tyler Smith gives each of the women her own space -- an elegant dressing room for Clarissa, a chic sitting area for Pauline, a teen pink bedroom for Brandi. But O'Brien and director Kim St. Leon don't keep the women isolated; instead, they invade each other's spaces and lives in a messy quest for dominance.
Triptych, you should know, is full of the frank sexual content that got some of the London-based O'Brien's work banned in her native country. Pauline's randy talk covers just about every body part, and at one point, she demonstrates her own power over Clarissa with a sneering seductiveness.
St. Leon, who finds just the right mixture of sensuality, comedy and jealousy to keep Triptych hurtling through its intermission-free 70 minutes, helps all three actresses achieve performances more complex than their archetypal titles would suggest.
Ives makes Clarissa a woman who keeps her cool even in the face of an angry wife, though an unexpected pregnancy cracks the facade. Dean comes off as both precocious and sensible, then gets a wild yet sad scene in which a tripping Brandi expresses her loneliness. And the always inventive Morgan, here first among equals, manages to find within the larger-than-life Pauline the frightened woman hiding behind the bravado.
Irish author Edna O'Brien, well-known in her home country for sexually charged books and plays, has in her current repertoire a saucy, caustic echo to Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? called Triptych, about three women devoted to a philandering, disloyal cad.
It's a slight echo, powered by estrogen and profane bluster during a 70-minute workout at the Museum of Art's auditorium in downtown Fort Lauderdale. O'Brien's play is undeniably cheesy, yet this regional premiere from the Inside Out Theatre Company offers highly charged, watch-me roles for three actresses up to very big dramatic challenges.
Lisa Morgan is the possessive wife Pauline, a performance similar to Morgan's award-winning turn last season as Albee's harridan in Virginia Woolf. Typecasting sometimes can be a good thing; certainly Inside Out director Kim St. Leon struck paydirt in this case.
Sandra Ives is the mistress, Clarissa, conveying an obsession that refuses to wither under Morgan's profane onslaught.
A triptych is an art work consisting of three panels. The third in O'Brien's setting is daddy's darling, spoiled teenage daughter Brandi. The roles are three equal points in an emotional triangle, and actress Kim Morgan Dean delivers a compelling portrait as the punkish girl.
Triptych, a minor sensation when it debuted in 2003 in San Francisco, has since been performed successfully in U.S. regional theaters and South Africa, but was dismissed off-Broadway in 2004 for its shallow and "overripe" soap opera soul.
Still, there is something fascinating about watching these three women engage in the kind of rarely seen (onstage) locker-room language and confrontation that we take for granted in dramas written about, and by, men. While Triptych may not be the best literary example of O'Brien's work — the author, now in her 70s, saw her early books banned in her native Ireland — it displays her unabashed approach to sexuality. St. Leon takes full advantage of that for the Inside Out production.
Clarissa is a noted British actress performing classic plays in New York. She's starting an affair with Henry when his wife, a former actress herself, visits the star in her dressing room in a clumsy attempt to head off the relationship.
Apparently, it's the latest of many for the invisible Henry. But it seems to stick, and the wife grows ever more desperate in attempts to scare or shame the mistress into breaking it off. At one point, Pauline seduces Clarissa herself in a blatant fantasy of a ménage à trois. Meanwhile, daughter Brandi is appalled at her mother's behavior.
O'Brien packs a lot of issues into the hour-plus tale, yet the Inside Out staging surmounts the busy, soapy veneer to show more complex emotions and development of the characters. Viewer caution, however: The language is coarse, and in some cases designed to shock.
The museum's auditorium is designed as a lecture theater and allows only simple staging. The troupe's designers use the space well, with a set by Tyler Smith that displays Clarissa's backstage dressing room, Pauline's lonely study and Brandi's girlish bedroom.