Watching a relationship grow can bring humor, or sadness, or passion, or indifference, and watching Ruth and Lisa run the six-year emotional marathon that is Donald Margulies’s "Collected Stories" takes us through a similar gantlet as Nancy Lewis and Megan Maguire wield a collection of verbal whips and truncheons that we can neither evade nor escape.
A production of the Orange Girls, the dramatic comedy (or comic drama) opened over the weekend to run through Aug. 2 in COCA’s Black Box Theater.
It’s a simple little story: Lisa (Maguire) is a young, fearful graduate student in a writing program taught by the experienced, prize-winning Ruth (Lewis). She obviously has talent, or Ruth would not have accepted her, first as a student, then as an assistant-housekeeper-secretary of some sort, a role that Margulies never defines. Still, Lisa, a suck-up sycophant always seeking praise, never seems to hit the right note in the relationship, and Ruth revels in the control and the fact that she can so easily rub salt into Lisa’s open wounds.
Lewis, a past master at portraying a holy terror, is in her element, especially with a target that just sits there and awaits the blows with hidden pleasure, the opposite of Anna Leonowens’s bitter cynicism as she mock-begs the King of Siam, "Give us a kick if you please, your majesty; give us a kick if you would, your majesty. . . ahhh, that was good, your majesty."
Maguire, speaking nervously and much too fast, is no match for the woman she admires. Meanwhile, Lewis, speaking slowly and sonorously, simply carves up her victim, allowing the words to come out clearly and with perfect emphasis. It’s fine work by Lewis. She also delivers well in a monologue that becomes a reverie as she remembers a long-ago love affair.
But Lisa has her revenge, and using one of the precepts that Ruth has taught her just twists the knife that we discover is almost self-inserted in a fit of suicidal pique.
Whether Ruth is correct in her anger is a topic for debate. What is the statute of limitations? Does anyone remember? Does anyone care? Are writers more important than the words they write? Are Republican gubernatorial hi-jinks more important than their accomplishments?
Ed Coffield directs smoothly, restraining his cast from going overboard. Set, costumes and lights, by Alex M. Gaines, Darren Hansen and Hans Fredrickson, respectively, are simple and effective.
"Collected Stories" works well. Margulies is not above reaching for the cheap laugh, but when it comes to writing comedy, any laugh can be a successful one.
An Orange Girls production at COCA’s Black Box, through Aug. 2
-Joe