Enjoyable and Farce Abound in ‘Girls’ Weekend’ at Circle Theatre

It’s been mentioned that just about 88% of personal guide golf equipment are all-female, a incontrovertible fact that seemingly wouldn’t shock Dot, Meg, Carol, and Ellie, the 4 girls who collect in a Minnesotan cabin in Karen Schaeffer’s play Girls’ Weekend (onstage at Circle Theatre by way of August twenty third).

They’re there to debate their newest learn—nicely, that’s the plan, anyway. But it is a farce, and farces imply problems.

The cabin belongs to Dot (Stacy Dawe), divorcée and mom. She has a unfastened, carefree lifestyle—wait til you hear concerning the thanks observe—and tends to easy out her days with wine and her nights with sleeping capsules. Carol (Dakota Riehl-Davis) may in all probability do with some smoothing out herself; vibrant and energetic, she intently displays her fertility cycle, all the time alert to the moments when she ought to decrease the drawbridge and let her husband in. Meg (Lorna Torres), newly widowed, is preserving a secret from the group: she’s seeing Dot’s son. Not even Ellie (Michaela Faith), Meg’s fun-loving daughter, is aware of about it.

There you’ve gotten it, proper? Food; wine; laughter; just a little gossip; just a little bawdy humor; and the consolation and heat of girls grateful for one another’s firm: like sitting in a snug chair close to a crackling fireplace. Only issues get just a little wilder than anticipated. Like somebody had tossed a burning paper airplane right into a fireworks manufacturing unit.

It seems Ellie had met a man on the town (Bubba, performed by Drew Huegli). Bubba isn’t essentially a reputation to encourage confidence, however she likes him anyway; she makes a comically elaborate plan to see him later that night, after everybody else has gone to mattress. So she hopes, anyway.

But there’s extra: Stephen (Calvin Kim), Meg’s beau, exhibits up unexpectedly, bored with hiding their relationship from the world. Meg hides him. Sheriff Tom Lane (Dan Braker), a lonely, amiable man, arrives to warn everybody concerning the situations of the roads. And Rick (Troy Harvey), Carol’s husband, is en route house when he will get an pressing name: most fertility is now, so get again right here, solely don’t let anyone see you. 

You guessed it: they’re not going to get to the guide.

As the play goes on, issues ramp up. Dot breaks out some pot (Schaeffer wrote the play in 2013, pre-legalization; Dot received a medical marijuana prescription for her canine, supposedly for glaucoma). That can be wonderful, if it weren’t for the wine, and the sleeping capsules, and the sheriff, for God’s sake; earlier than lengthy Dot is useless to the world, though, fortunately, not useless herself. But it isn’t straightforward to cover a passed-out lady, it seems, particularly in case you’re addled your self, and particularly if a sheriff’s knocking on the door.

Like the very best farces, Girls’ Weekend makes one promise to its viewers: it is going to entertain them. And it does that in spades, from the high-pitched absurdity of its most frantic moments to the individuality it grants every of its characters. An unpretentious decency shine by way of every character (nicely, perhaps not Bubba). 

Faith, who appears like a midwestern Alexis Bledel, performs Ellie as a bored, good-hearted woman, a sort acquainted to most individuals; who hasn’t recognized (or been) her? Her efficiency appeared easy, as did that of Riehl-Davis, whose Carol would certainly wrap you a plate of one thing to go—if it wasn’t ovulation time, anyway. Kim’s Stephen appears constructed from a basis of stable happiness. And it’d be unattainable to dislike Braker’s sheriff, who simply can’t cease himself from lingering.

The set design properly evokes the heat of a cabin and the chilly of the wintry world outdoors it. Also properly evoked is the early twenty first century, by the cell telephones, the clothes, and, better of all, the music, which is bound to take viewers members again to a time that can appear (to some) to be yesterday.

More than anything, Girls’ Weekend is enjoyable. There are performs designed to place audiences by way of the wringer—to grind their faces into the insufferable tragedies of the world. Those who need which might be welcome to it. For the remainder of us, nicely, we’ll take the cabin.

Girls’ Weekend 
Circle Theatre
Aug. 7-23