Posted on: Friday, May 11, 2001
Stage Scene
'Grace' comedy does duet on camaraderie
By Derek Paiva
Advertiser Staff Writer
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| Shari Lynn and Jo Pruden portray two very different women who manage to become friends "Grace and Glorie," opening Wednesday at Manoa Valley Theatre.
• "Grace and Glorie" |
Grace is a feisty, cantankerous 90-year-old mountain woman with terminal cancer and a plan to die in her beloved ramshackle cabin in the heart of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. Glorie is the former high-powered New York City consultant assigned as Grace's caretaker after moving to the area with her husband following the death of their 12-year-old son.
That's the setup for "Grace and Glorie," Manoa Valley Theatre's production of playwright Tom Ziegler's poignant comedy about two headstrong women who forge the beginnings of a deep, but unlikely, friendship over the course of a week together. Premiering off Broadway in 1996 with Estelle Parsons and Lucie Arnaz as, respectively, Grace and Glorie, the two-character play opened to sterling reviews for its well-written, somewhat lyrical script.
"Shari Lynn, who plays Glorie, first brought the script to me and asked if I would consider it for Readers Theatre," "Grace" director and Army Community Theatre program director Vanita Rae Smith says of her first experience with the play in 1998. "I read it and just fell in love."
Smith directed the play as part of ACT's 1998 Readers Theatre schedule, where actors read plays directly to an audience with a narrator adding connecting explanations of the physical set, costumes, even creating sound effects. Reciting the lines of Grace and Glorie in that production were Jo Pruden and Lynn, who also signed on for Smith's full-scale production set for a three-week run starting Wednesday. The director calls the duo "perfectly cast."
"Jo grew up in Enterprise, Alabama," says Smith. "It's a small Southern town, and the roots are planted deep there. So Jo knows how to really use the country accent, which is all about the way you turn a phrase."
And local singer/actor Shari Lynn?
"Well, Shari, of course, is definitely a city girl," laughs Smith. "So you've got two people who also came together in real life and have developed quite a friendship over the past two years since we last did this." Smith has wanted to turn in a full production of "Grace" ever since its successful Readers Theatre run, and immediately connected with the two female characters on her first reading.
"You've got one woman who's 90 and one who's barely 40, so there's a 50-year span there," Smith says of the play. "Yet the camaraderie that develops between them is very, very deep. Ziegler captures these women for the audience so well. The differences between these two ladies were so clear, the characters sketched so well, I swore that he must have been talking about someone in his family."
