Hovey's 'Keely and Du' holds audience hostage
The Hovey Players aren't afraid to take risks when it comes to play selection.
The subject of abortion, for instance, isn't exactly what you'd expect them to take on. But Hovey is tackling it with their production of Jane Martin's "Keely and Du."
It's not as if the play comes out of nowhere. It received the New Play Award from the American Theater Critics Association in 1994, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and was quite the rage for a while in regional theaters.
Jane Martin is a pseudonym for a playwright who's written 10 full-length plays and six one-acts without ever revealing herself or himself, even to collect prestigious awards, though many suspect she's actually Jon Jory, the former artistic director of Actors Theatre of Louisville.
But even with this pedigree behind it, a play about abortion is a tough sell, and it's not as well written as all the acclaim would indicate.
The play opens with a groggy young woman being carried to a hospital bed and handcuffed to it. We soon learn that she had been drugged by an anesthesiologist so that an underground group called Operation Retrieval could kidnap her for the purpose of preventing her from aborting her baby. They plan to hold her until she's in the seventh month of her term, and they've arranged for a family to adopt the baby if she doesn't want to keep it.
If this seems like a nightmare to the audience, you can be sure it does to the young woman, Keely, as she emerges from the effects of the drugs, discovers she's handcuffed to the bed and begins to grasp why.
Philana Gnatowski is terrific in the role of Keely as she pleads to be released, soon becomes desperate and then starts screaming hysterically. The best thing about the play is that it offers an actress a chance to play the part of a young woman who's in a very extreme position. And Gnatowski takes full advantage of the opportunity, playing the whole range of emotions with considerable honesty and believability.
But on other fronts, the play has serious problems that somehow were lost in the audacity of the premise when the play first received so much attention.
The play leaves us little option as to who we'll sympathize with - Keely, who's chained to a bed for five months because she wanted to abort a fetus conceived when her ex-husband raped her, or Du, a nurse who stays with Keely, and Walter, a minister, who spout traditional anti-abortion views to Keely.
But anyone except the most radical pro-lifer would feel that Keely was being terribly wronged. That may have been the playwright's intention - to show up the pro-life position by taking it to an extreme - but are pro-lifers going to see or listen to this play? A better play would have tried to make both positions and the people behind them as convincing and appealing as possible, so we're torn between them.
Watching a woman chained to a bed with dim prospects of being released while enduring efforts to convert her tends to make us feel that we're chained to our theater seats. It certainly gives moral self-righteousness and forcing one's views on others a bad rap. But didn't we already know that? We want theater to be more unexpected, more fluid and offer more of a challenge to figure out what's going on - in other words, to respect our intelligence more.
The play starts to open up a little, as Du's humanity emerges, and she gives Keely small freedoms and rewards, although Du never doubts the rightness of the kidnapping. This allows Ann Carpenter in the role of Du a chance to show her richness as an actress, especially her playfulness and warmth. The scene in which she curls Keely's hair around strips of felt while both are sitting on the bed is particularly touching.
There's nothing redeemable whatsoever about Walter, the extremely self-righteous minister and mid-level manager of this kidnapping. The fault lies with the writing, but it would have helped if Larry Lickteig in the role had tried to play against type more.
Robin Gabrielli as Cole, Keely's ex-husband, might have shown a little more remorse when he first tries to appeal to Keely, but his performance grows with considerable power into a kind of ferocity as he continues to plead with her.
The play eventually does offer some welcome surprises, which makes the second act more interesting than the first.
Michelle M. Aguillon's appropriately stark set features a hospital bed and cement block walls created with a paintbrush that reinforce that fact that Keely has no chance of escape.
Director Bill Doscher has done an admirable job of wrestling with this script, but what it needs more than a director's wrestling is a playwright's reconceiving and rewriting.
WHAT: "Keely and Du"
WHEN: Through March 15
WHERE: Hovey Players, 9 Spring St., Waltham
COST: $15; $13 for students and seniors
INFO: 781-893-9171; www.hoveyplayers.com