The raging storm might have you thinking this violent weather disturbance is the title character in Elizabeth Hemmerdinger’s “Squall.” But the tempest outside has nothing on the tempestuousness unfurling inside between two feuding Typhoon Marys. Hemmerdinger could just as easily have called her play “Squabble.”
“Squall,” staged by Modern Muse at the Arvada Center’s sparkling new Black Box Theatre, opens as a goth psychological thriller but ends as an unrelentingly bleak and incongruous character study of two sad and damaged women.
Famous TV personality Diana Bristol (Martha Harmon Pardee) is packing her childhood summer home on a Maine island after her mother’s suicide. Enter a far-too-obviously lying, unhinged intruder named Cordelia (Karen LaMoureaux) who knows far too much about Diana and her family. Turns out she was a fellow mental patient with Diana’s mother, Rose, and there’s something in this house she wants.
Now they’re trapped together: Tires have been slashed, the bridge washed out in the storm. Out come a knife, a meat cleaver, a gun (though you never believe for a second that either is ever in any real danger). All these hyperbolic noir elements seem intentionally tongue in cheek, through to what effect isn’t clear, other than to establish the creepy tone of old chillers like “Wait Until Dark” and “Cape Fear,” or more recently, “Deathtrap” and “Misery.” But the unfolding relationship never matches those in tone, style or purpose.
“Squall” is a highly unlikely play that’s much easier to appreciate than to like, because it is so incessantly antagonistic and humorless. Diana is brittle, dismissive and cold. Cordelia is just a wack job. Neither is easy to like. There’s enough baggage between these two to keep Samsonite in business for decades.
For two hours they spar, trade power, turn tables, compete for a dead woman’s affection, debate who’s more messed up and even play a bizarre game of dress-up. But to what point?
There is a neat twist to this hostage drama: Because Diana is still grappling with her mother’s suicide, and because Cordelia has shared such recent proximity to her, our captive here actually needs more from her captor than vice versa.
Diana has made her fortune making stooges just like Cordelia reveal their deepest pain on TV, but today it is Diana who will come to grips with traumas from her childhood, issues she has buried under protective layers that are about to come unpeeled. In this game of cat and mouse, you are never quite sure who’s cat and who’s mouse. That’s compelling.
It’s a given these two wounded pugilists will become invested in one another. They must, of course, but it happens almost to the emotional exclusion of an audience that hasn’t been given enough reason to invest in either one of them. By the time they start to truly care for one another, we’re left behind, trapped on the other side of the storm’s emotional island.
I’ve never understood the brazenness (or foolhardiness) of playwrights who won’t give us even one character to truly root for. I blame David Mamet for that. (But I blame him for everything.) With “Squall,” we must content ourselves instead with rooting for the performances. Director Billie McBride gets solid work from Pardee and Lamoreaux. But about the time they start getting nice to one another is the time we want them to really start tearing into one another.
Pardee is a pro who eats tough-girl parts like Diana for breakfast. As she unravels, she nicely conveys the paradox of being a woman who knows her mother was a menace, while the little girl inside her still thinks of her as a good mom.
While I’d love to see someone, anyone, in this town give this top actress a role with, I dunno, trace elements of sweetness, I’m frothing to see what she does as Martha in Paragon’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” this July.
LaMoureaux is far too obvious at first, but impressive for wholeheartedly embracing Cordelia’s schizophrenia as it grows from creepy skittishness to ugly, outright freakishness.
An aside: These character names are thematically confusing. Diana was goddess of the hunt; Cordelia the obedient but exiled daughter of King Lear. But here Cordelia is on the hunt, and Diana is the rejected child. It’s as if the names should be reversed.
“Squall” is worth seeing if only to see these capable actors mix it up, but by the time this storm passes, there’s not much left behind but a path of emotional devastation.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“Squall”
DRAMA | Presented by Modern Muse | Written by Elizabeth Hemmerdinger | Directed by Billie McBride | Starring Martha Harmon Pardee and Karen LaMoureaux | THROUGH MAY 27 | At the Arvada Center, 6901 Wadsworth Blvd. | 7 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 1:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays | 2 hours, 5 minutes | $15-$20 | 303-780-7836 or modernmusetheatre.com
