Theater reviews: Grey Gardens and My Sister in This House

by Joan Arbery of Renegade Bus

How like October to be mournful, and there are two crazy lady plays in town this month to make it even more spooky. Grey Gardens at WaterTower Theatre through October 25 tells the story (in musical form) of the fallen socialites Edith and Edie Beale, mother and daughter, who for decades live in a ramshackle mansion in East Hampton and keep each other catty company. My Sister in This House, at the Bath House Cultural Center with WingSpan Theatre Company through October 24, re-imagines the tale of the Papin sisters. The girls work as servants for a wealthy mother and daughter. However, having been traumatized by something in their past, they turn to each other for comfort, ultimately starting a sexual relationship with one another. It ends badly.

Terry Martin’s direction of Grey Gardens certainly sees some laughs from his dancing and singing cast. Kimberly Whalen positively sparkles as the young, beset upon Little Edie. It’s hard to believe such a woman could turn out to be so overlooked in later years. Diana Sheehan as Edith Beale in the first act, and as the grown up Edie in the second, steals the show. She is a diva both when she’s crooning next to her piano and when she’s in various states of dishabille. Sheehan’s portrayal of Edie reveals more of Edie’s complexities than even the documentary allows. Christopher Pickart’s set design, which alternates between sunny vignettes of life in the 1940s and the rickety, deserted halls of the 1970s house, also marvelously captures the Beale women’s fall from grace.

Whereas the musical seems to end on a note of mounting isolation, the Mayles’ documentary closes with Edie dancing around. As her mother even says, it’s as if Edie, despite the fact that she’s 56, has never grown up. While Edie and Edith are alone in their house of cats and raccoons, they’re also surrounded by the past, their own fantasies, and each other. Yes, it’s cloying and claustrophobic, but there’s a modicum of choice involved in their situation. However dank, musty, and overgrown their house is, the art of Edie’s clothing, the sound of old music, and the fading grace of their own lives, sustain them.

My Sister in This House, directed by Marjorie Hayes, is a fitting parallel to the codependency of the Beales, striking a far more melancholic and perverse note. Christine and Lea Papin, played by Catherine DuBord and Whitney Wilson respectively, have suffered a hard childhood, and Christine invites Lea to join her at her job. But Lea is a bit of a loose canon. She’s barely a teenager, and has had a close relationship with her mother. When she gets to Christine, she can only cling. Christine, however, is flinty and severe. While she gradually softens to her sister, she is determined to keep her job. However, as her relationship with her sister deepens, Christine’s work slackens. Meanwhile, Mme Danzard and her daughter both seem to have a thing for the girls, creating lesbian innuendo on top of incestuous activity in the house.

Clare Floyd DeVries’ set plays up the contrast between the hoity-toity life of the Danzards downstairs and the cold, barren room that the Papin girls share. The acting, especially by DuBord and Susan Sargeant (Mme Danzard), sustains the play’s heavy theme. Sargeant is great as the la-di-da Mme Danzard, and DuBord seems both ferocious and terribly vulnerable. Isabelle Danzard (Stephanie Stuart) is a little too petulant, pouting and giggling forcedly. Wilson as Lea certainly seems psychotic and unhinged. The final scenes, where everything ends in butchery and screaming, are pretty powerful. However, some of the more humorous scenes with the Danzards, juxtaposed with the increasing discomfort of the Papin girls’ erotic relationship, don’t fit.

My Sister in This House is an odd play to produce. It’s not that human experience doesn’t encompass these questions—control, servitude, loneliness, grief, and searching for solace—but the play’s dwelling on something so desperately hopeless is perversely dark. Yes, the Papins’ story is true. So, for that matter, is Lizzie Borden’s. What are artistic representations of these tales for? That people can be driven to do the most diabolical things to protect their way of life? Understood. But there’s no catharsis here. It is beyond tragedy.

Don’t get me wrong. If you’re looking to freak yourself out, then My Sister in This House might do the trick. But what I find in this production, and to a lesser degree in Grey Gardens, is female experience as it has too long been perceived: hysterical, confined, freakish, and in the end, inverted. These are the women in the attic who can’t be rescued. To see such stagings of the female person, especially in the context of true stories, is to feel that all women somehow contain alter-egos that verge on madness and murder. If you enter these houses, beware.