As the lights come up in Karen Paull's Flesh and Blood, we are faced with a street woman attempting to bake a cake for her five-year-old daughter. She is wacked out, displaying all the symptoms of a manic-depressive. We question her reality - and ours - in this short play with music. Most of the songs were sung a capella.
Flesh and Blood, like many of the current crop of new plays, is a large collections of short scenes. We follow the lives of Judith (impressively performed by Leslie Gold), the disturbed birth mother, and Lisa (Misty Reams), her troubled daughter. Along the way we meet her stepmother, played by Katherine Forbes and Jazzman (Debbie Nicastro). Finally, there are Wendy Savage and Laurie Reynolds, sometimes with Katherine Forbes, who serves as the ensemble and portrayed a diverse group of characters.
The performers are very good, with good singing voices. Gold's scenes when she's in the depths of depression are almost painful to watch. Savage's inmate of a mental institution is also convincing. Reams handles her character aging from five years old well into adulthood quite well. Nicastro's Jazzman, a muse-observer-helpmate to Judith, seems omnipresent. Laurie Reynolds has to cross over in one scene to be the seducer of Judith and father of her child. It works.
Bob Korbett's lighting is appropriately moody. Floyd Woods' soundtrack offers all the right things at the right time, adding a degree of reality throughout. The infusion of thematic songs, while totally in context, feels jarring the first few times.
Flesh and Blood is based, in part, on events and emotions in the playwright's life. It is a not an easy play to see. There's humor, but the subject is a serious, traumatic situation that is all too common. It certainly could be expanded into a full-length work.
