Review | Sarasota's Urbanite offers a striking 'Drowning Girls'
Everything about the current production of "The Drowning Girls" at Urbanite Theatre is imaginative and ethereally beautiful.
The season-ending production from Sarasota's most distinctive theater company features three fine actors -- Katherine Michelle Tanner, Nicole Jeannine Smith and Carley Cornelius -- in emotionally demanding and physically difficult roles. They all provide consistently excellent performances, and each has at least a couple of transcendent moments. They are soaking wet throughout, or a least in soaking-wet clothes, and they occasionally have to perform submerged in water, or with water pouring on their head from above.
Brendan Ragan's direction is somber and unsettling.
It's performed on a stage that's simple and striking, with a set by Rew Tippin and lights by Ryan Finzelber. The key elements are three bathtubs, one for each of three women, each half-filled with water. The water serves literal, metaphorical and even aural functions. The actors spend much of their time lying in their respective tubs, and when they stand, water pours from their costumes (period corsets and white cotton gowns designed by Riley Leonhardt), creating a disturbing sonic backdrop to the dialogue.
It's a compact show, only about 70 minutes long and presented without intermission. It's goes quickly and it's so impressive to watch that you may be heading home before you realize that the script isn't as good as the production.
"The Drowning Girls" is based on an actual series of killings from about a century ago in England. A man, who used various names, married three women, each of whom had only known him a very short time. Right after the wedding, he persuaded each of them to buy life insurance, and before long he drowned them in bathtubs.
As the actions begins, the three women are already dead. They enter the stage with a stereotypical zombie gait, submerge themselves in bath water, then sit up and converse with each other and the audience about their lives, marriages and deaths. They eventually take other roles -- the parents who tried to dissuade them from rushing into marriage, the lawyers at the killer's trial and even the killer himself.
It's a compelling story, but unfortunately the playwrights -- there are three of them, Beth Graham, Charlie Tomlinson and Daniela Vlaskalic -- don't provide anything but the most superficial insight into the victims or their killer. The women were "vulnerable," we're told repeatedly, and the killer charmed them so they believed his obvious lies, and took out huge life insurance policies immediately after the weddings.
It's probably all true of the actual victims who inspired the play, but it's a cliche and it leaves us with the same question we started with -- namely, why would attractive, young, intelligent women so eagerly walk into such an obvious trap? There are some half-hearted attempts to explain in terms of the repression of women in that era, but those too are trite and shallow.
We also learn nothing useful or interesting about the killer, except that he was a nasty kid who grew into a much nastier adult. And that, of course, is what we would assume about a guy who killed three wives.
But there's plenty to admire about this production of "The Drowning Girls," including the absolutely gorgeous three-part harmonies at the close, when the women sing "Nearer My God to Thee." (The song that, at least according to legend, the band on the Titanic played as hundreds of people drowned, in the same year that the action in "The Drowning Girls" ends.)
On balance, it's a worthwhile hour-and-a-quarter of theater. But it's as intellectually frustrating as it is aesthetically fulfilling.
Details: Through May 22, Urbanite Theatre, 1487 Second St., Sarasota. Show times: 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, plus 2 p.m. April 23. Tickets: $20; students with ID $5. Information: 941-321-1397.
This story was originally published April 29, 2016 at 5:44 PM with the headline "Review | Sarasota's Urbanite offers a striking 'Drowning Girls' ."