Slowgirl, Greg Pierce's quirky drama about two wounded souls confronting each other -- and their demons -- in the Costa Rican jungle, comes to the Geffen after a successful run at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. Because the director (Randall Arney) and the actors (William Peterson and Rae Gray) worked together on the play in Chicago, the L.A. production is uncommonly polished and assured.
Peterson takes on the role of Sterling, a middle-aged dweeb who has fled a failed law practice and a broken marriage, opting to live as a semi-recluse on a patch of land in the hills of Costa Rica. His lonely, self-contained life is disrupted when his 17-year-old niece Becky shows up unexpectedly, on the lam from the law. (She's been charged with being complicit in the death of a mentally handicapped girl -- the "slowgirl" of the title -- at a wild, drunken party).
Becky is a volatile mixture of naivete and street-smarts, bravado and timidity. She's seventeen going on thirty. She also has her secrets, just as Uncle Sterling does, and Slowgirl derives much of its drama -- and comedy -- from the confrontations between these two seemingly opposite human beings, the peeling back of psychological layers. Eventually they discover things that bind them and give them a common strength and purpose.
Slowgirl starts out as a kind of death dance, then turns into a dance of life. All this happens on a two-sided tropical set (clever design by Takeshi Kata, aided by Richard Woodbury's jungeloid sound effects).
