Giddy, headstrong Pandora Kingsley (Leah Michelle Roberts) is hellbent on marrying Edvard Lunt (Emmett Bowles), a writer more than twice her age who has divorced his wife of 23 years and deserted his seven children. In Beth Henley's deliciously subversive Impossible Marriage, Pandora's genteel Georgia mother (the splendid Laurene Scalf), hugely pregnant older sister Floral (Susan Shumate), and Edward's morose eldest son Sidney (Mike Brooks) do everything they can to abort the wedding. Shumate and Brooks -- she with her spot-on Southern talk and ways, he with his impeccable timing and hangdog body language -- lend their characters a depth that adds dimension to Henley's witty exchanges and off-the-wall happenings. They top an excellent cast under Amy Attaway's assured direction.
Christopher Guetig, faithful and poignant, strikes just the right note as Floral's husband Jonsey Whitman (their union hides secrets), who agrees with everyone else that being handsome is what he is. As Reverend Jonathan Lawrence, Necessary Theater artistic director Tad Chitwood undergoes a startling transformation while providing marriage counseling for Floral. Bowles and Roberts engagingly and ebulliently portray the May-December couple in all their on-again, off-again, trauma-flavored goofiness.
