Carol Rosegg's photo
appeared in the New York Times review of "Vita & Virginia," one of two plays I enjoyed last month in their final perfomances. The pose was not replicated by Kathleen Chalfant, left, as Virginia Woolf and Patricia Elliott as Vita Sackville-West. They were always at a distance of several feet apart.
Each stood behind a music stand with the script before her. Often one or the other would turn to direct her words to her partner, but they were never close. This seemed right since the text was letters. And pointed up the geographic and emotional distance in their relationship. Some of that had to do with their class difference, some with Woolf's reluctance to be intimate. "I was always sexually cowardly," Woolf writes in one early letter.
Eileen Atkins has adapted a correspondence that spanned rom the 1920s through early World War II. Atkins, a woman of many theatrical parts--actor, writer was the co-creator of the British TV series, "Upstairs, Downstairs." (From the halcyon days of the early 1970s when parents and children sat together to watch television.) As skillfully as she's assembled the letters, Atkins' adaptation is enhanced by the two women who performed. (Atkins herself appeared as Woolf in the first production of "Vita & Virginia.")
You will not be surprised that the audience was older women like me. Two younger women sat next to me and I would have liked to know if they had many friends who'd come to see it. There's a picture HERE of Chalfant who looked just right--wrinkles not hidden and reading glasses with extended earpieces perched at the end of her nose--to be playing Virginia Woolf. She and Elliott made me feel I was walking in an English garden and overhearing an intimate conversation between two very verbal women struggling with their times and complex choices--married to men and somewhat closeted lesbians.
[I now long for a pair of these "funky" glasses which seem more to the point and more glamourous than my ordinary bi-focals .]
Two days later, we went to an itty-bitty space on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village for "Kitty and Lina" --unknown to us except through a review in the Times. Once again the publicity photo gives a skewed idea of what's ahead. Sitting in the audience before the play began, we wondered why there was only one chair next to a small round table. Would one of the actors stand throughout the performance?
No. First Jennifer Boutell appeared as Kitty and told a story of coming eagerly to New York from a Baptist family in Texas. We listened as her dream of joining the Actors' Studio and stardom elluded her. Life became drearier as she struggled to make ends meet. She exited.
Lina, played by Marilyn Bernard, pranced into view and immediately engaged us. As a starter, she advised she was a pretty snappy woman who would go home with one of the men in the audience. Gliding to the chair, she pulled a cigarette out of her purse, put it into a holder, then was briefly indignant with the stage manager when told she could not smoke in the theatre.
In her life story of a single woman in 1950 and 60s New York, I was reminded of women I'd known who had a great deal of charm and few skills. Often their road to survival was pleasing men. That's Lina. We meet her after many years of an affair with an older married man, who has left her for a woman the age she was when she arrived in the City. Now alone in a youthful New York, she is, in the words of the Times' reviewer, "saucy and poignant." Another terrific older woman in theatre...three in one week!
Next week we re-visit playwright Susan Bernfield's wondrous evocation of all things Nixonian--and its dependence on dependent women-- STRETCH (a fantasia). Runs through May 26. You need to decide as you read this to buy one of its cheap tickets (under $25), because it has just received an over-the-top review in The New York Times.
For beautiful pictures of her yarn and her farm, Meadowcroft, her farm there is a brand new book, 
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