Perfect Pie Sells to Audience by the Slice

Author: Suzanne Mozes

"I will not forget you. You are carved in the palm of my hand."

So begins and concludes Judith Thompsons' "Perfect Pie," performed this past weekend in the Seeler Studio Theater, with a rightly deserved visceral image.

This faculty show, directed by Professor of Theater and Women's and Gender Studies Cheryl Faraone, tenderly delves into the relationship between two estranged women, Patsy and Marie, through conversations in a Canadian farmhouse kitchen that send the women reeling back to memories from their childhood and adolescence.

Based on a true story of two fourteen-year-old girls who died while holding hands on a train track as the train came barreling down upon them, the story unfolds as Marie returns to Patsy after years of separation from their childhood friendship, which bitterly ended when Marie abandoned Patsy in a coma. Marie, married with children, admires Marie for her theatrical fame, now renamed Francesca, who has been married and divorced three times. Through flashbacks, the girls were clearly as different as children as they are now, but the bonds of childhood experiences still unite them despite their awkward adult interactions.

Invoking Van Gogh's "Starry Night," the mournful drone of bagpipe music guides the audience into the intrinsic sorrow impressed into the dialogue and scenery.

Despite the French setting for the painting, the Scottish roots of the bagpipe's notes or the Ontario backdrop for the actual play, the sensual sadness that "Starry Night" invokes with depressing blue hues reflects in Becky Martin '04 and Marieka Peterson's '04 exceptional performances of Adult Patsy and Adult Marie.

Painted while Van Gogh sat in mental institution, this impressionistic painting invokes the same sensory details that "Perfect Pie" relies upon with large, languid strokes that beg to be felt and experienced.

Van Gogh stamps a small rural town, like "Perfect Pie's" Canadian rural Marmora setting, in the hills that flow down with blue stokes like water from a river, like the tears from Teen Marie's eyes (Lily Balsen '06) during the climactic reenactment of the rape scene.

The tree, wild with warped branches spiking upward, caution the bristly danger in Young Marie's (Eliza Hulme '05) spiky, ratty hair infested with lice, and the swirling wind in Van Gogh's night sky embodies the eddying emotions that rise and fall and intermingle between the emotional reunion of Patsy and Marie.

Assistant Technical Director Hallie Zieselman's dual level set design, wedged into the corner of Seeler Studio Theater, served "Perfect Pie" particularly well for its poignant moments. While allowing characters to climb steps to different arenas for character development, the amphitheater design let the audience peer into the corner that the characters fight to break out from.

However, the oversized wooden and rope swing, while allowing characters to sit side-by-side on the upper level deck, drew too much attention upward. It gives too much weight to the upper portion of the scenery when the majority of the action takes place on the stage's ground floor.

The steps, an innovative construction sustained by vertical poles that jut through the air, painfully demarcate the space and maintain "the feeling of accurate representation of this rural, isolated community," that Faraone explains serves as particular challenge in the production.

Moreover, their characteristic rural and urban Canadian accents maintained this essential feature, and in turn an accomplishment, of the performance.

The cast of "Perfect Pie" echoes with such immense talent in a combination that a Middlebury stage has not seen in quite some time. Martin's performance embodies the mature role in a silent grace that thrusts the performance forward and inviting the other actresses to lean on the strength of her performance for support. While Peterson tended to overenunciate the incredulousness in her lines with a repeated a dramatic throwing up of her arms, she did embody the role of an actress that, as time went by, eased into a more likely character disposition.

Hulme's body language as the child of a drunken, poor, abusive mother resounded with a perfected study of juvenile behavior, and Erin Sullivan's '04 (Young Patsy) clever absorption of childhood speech tics gave the audience much needed comic relief.

While Joya Scott '04 (Teen Patsy) mothered the Teen Marie, Balsen's climactic scene in a ripped, sordid green dress shoved the performance over the line from simply affecting audience members to actually moving them.

When various generations of the characters remained on stage, the juxtaposition, while somewhat distracting, usually worked if motion was not involved and the characters were on the same plane of the set. When the children danced on the upper level while the adults spoke on the kitchen floor, the contrast would crumble.

After teaching Thompson's work in a Fall 2002 course, Faraone explains that she chose "Perfect Pie" because of the "the response of the students to the work ... I have taught Judith Thompson's work for years and have always been interested in someday directing one of her pieces. As for the all-female cast, since most traditional dramaturgy has a casting imbalance favoring men, our two shows this semester ("Perfect Pie" and "Cherry Orchard") together probably have a fairly even distribution of roles by gender."

Thompson, an eminent Canadian playwright graduated from Queen's University in 1976, and incorporated a somewhat autobiographical depiction of epilepsy through both Marie and Patsy.

Grappling with loss of friendship, finding identity within the community, the tension between urban and rural communities, abandoning religion and leaving one's roots to carry on with the rest of one's life, Thompsons' sixth play thrives on the sensations that remain with human beings for an entire lifetime. "Perfect Pie" concludes with Marie abandoning Patsy again, but despite this bleak conclusion, joyous moments spot the canvas of the performance like the stars lighting up Van Gogh's sky, providing more memories to fondly remember in spite of the present situation.