Stage Review
'Daughters' plays like Victorian-era treatise

"The tempering of a soul is long and arduous," and not always a good subject for dramatization.

Amanda Ward, right, and Pat Green play conjoined twins who narrate “Pharaoh’s Daughters,” a story about two Southern aristocrats who travel north and become abolitionists. Lynn L. Mayekawa

"Pharaoh’s Daughters" embarks on that difficult road, representing the history of the Grimke sisters,

a pair of young women from Charleston’s slave-holding aristocracy who traveled north in the 1830s to gain notoriety as abolitionists and early suffragettes.

Written and directed by Gene Shofner, the play offers a theatrical sidelight on the events leading up to the Civil War, but offers more biography and rhetoric than effective characterization. From its formal, stilted dialogue to its stiff-necked staging, the production — with a couple of exceptions — plays too much like a treatise.

The Grimke sisters were public lecturers at a time unused to women in that role. They were heckled, threatened and occasionally mobbed.

But the play adopts a tone of so much Victorian formality that lecturing is all the audience seems to get. Like many lectures, it makes its point long before it makes its conclusion.

First comes the biography. Act One establishes that the Grimkes are an old and proud Southern family. Sarah (Megan Evans) was one of 14 children and had dreams of studying Latin and law. Because those opportunities were unthinkable for a woman, she opted instead to become the godmother to her youngest sister Angelina (Leah Gigante).

Maturity and self-awareness bring increasing opposition to their slave-holding society. First Sarah, then Angelina, move north, become Quakers and begin speaking out for immediate emancipation. They represent the daughters of the Pharaoh, arguing for him to free his people.

Next comes the rhetoric. Most of Act Two re-creates the sisters’ public speeches, then fast-forwards to the end of their lives and establishes their legacy. So far, this is not especially interesting theater.

But Shofner does include some effective dramatic counterpoint to this history.

'Pharaoh's Daughters' UH-Manoa’s Department of Theatre and Dance, 8 p.m. Today and Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Earle Ernst Lab Theatre Tickets: $9 general admission; $7 students, seniors, military; $3 UH students 956-7655

The first is an uncharacteristically human scene in which Angelina and a fellow abolitionist, Theodore Weld (played by James Davenport), declare their love for each other. Here, the characters seem to take a break from their Victorian rectitude long enough to become flesh and blood. Shofner follows it up with a tenderly pantomimed wedding that adds real warmth.

The second theatrical element is a banjo player (Patrick Adams) and a pair of music hall singers (Amanda Ward and Patricia Greene) — twin sisters joined at the hip — who introduce each scene with narration and period songs. The technique lightens the heavy nature of the main story and makes for some unusual juxtaposition.

The principal players in this piece practice formidable elocution and generally protest too much, although Evans manages to pull together a consistent performance from bits and scraps of character hidden among the dialogue. A lot of effort has gone into "Pharaoh’s Daughters," but unfortunately, too much of it is daunting.

Joseph T. Rozmiarek is The Advertiser’s drama critic.

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