History: Reviews

Beau O'Reilly is a lucky man. He has not one but two of the sharpest actresses in town playing the leads in his new play, Dwarfed by Comparison. Lisa Black and Marianne Fieber, playing the quintessential sibling rivals Trixie and Alice Dashinski, put everything they have into bringing this script to life. Any actor in town could learn something from watching these two women work.

O'Reilly certainly hasn't laid out an easy course for them. His play moves back and forth between farce and psychological realism as Trixie and Alice try to navigate their way through and ultimately out of their absurdly dysfunctional family. Their mother Lucy (Beth-Ann O'Reilly-Amandes) can understand her life only insofar as it is reflected in television sitcoms from the 50s and 60s (she named her daughters after characters in The Honeymooners). Their father Sydney is a drunken, lascivious slob who constantly mumbles vaguely discernible vulgarities. He is such a cartoon that he is portrayed simply as a huge, horrifyingly comical bloated head (a puppet exquisitely designed by Blair Thomas and manned by Peter Reinemann).

Trixie and Alice have been scarred by their family in opposite ways. Trixie, who manifests a chronic skin disorder that seems to be eating her alive, is a chain-smoking alcoholic avant-garde theater artist. Alice, who practices her tap routines as though her life depends on it, is constantly cleaning up everyone's mess. By presenting his play in two distinctly different styles at once, O'Reilly gives Black and Fieber a run for their money. One moment Trixie is huddled nervously in the corner, scratching her infected back against the kitchen wall while shouting invectives at her hated mother; the next she is offering a generous hug to her mother at a funeral. Alice goes from tap-dancing on the kitchen counter to get her family's attention to sitting quietly in a bar and sharing her feelings with Gus the Waiter (Reinemann).

Both actresses meet the challenge. Their remarkably flexible performances make clear the precise level of reality the play is on from moment to moment, and they imbue their characters with a complexity and humanness that sets them apart from their one-dimensional family.

O'Reilly's warring theatrical styles create an accurate picture of family life: one moment an outrageous comedy, the next a made-for-TV movie. But while the structure adds a certain texture to the play, the two styles remain so distinct that it's difficult to tie all the intriguing fragments together into a unified whole.

Black and Fieber are supported by a strong cast, which also includes Jennifer Cozzi and Mark Comiskey. John Coyne's continually surprising set, with flats and platforms that alternately spin, fold down, and open up, ingeniously solves the dilemma of creating half a dozen locations in a space as cramped as the Curious. It's delightful to see so much intelligence in one production.