In what she deems a memory play, narrator Linda O’Shea tells the audience of four 1970s days when an Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish shook up her entire Irish Catholic family. Her narration gets frequently interrupted and briefly taken over by family members and visitors. All this activity occurs in two acts in the family’s common rooms to be like the era’s typical TV show episodes and with similar characterizations, jokes, and comic effects.
Josephine O’Shea has decided it’s time to have daughter Becky learn about facts of life. The mother (Lisa Bruneau, sweet) is overwhelmed by housework, care for her upstairs mother-in-law (Martha Velez-Reid, heard only but well), and outside obligations, so she asks daughter Linda to inform Becky about menstruation. Also to throw in facts about the “birds and bees.”
Linda (blunt, always dramatic Erin O’Connor) informs Becky in juicy language and graphic detail about having periods and sex. As a would-be detective like her idol Humphrey Bogart’s movie one, Becky (Willa Carpenter, properly adolescent) has preserved on her cassette tape recorder all of Linda’s pronouncements.
When Becky brings her recorder to school, the contents somehow get out to parish members, but especially parish priest Father Lovett. He regards the tape as a firearm against morality. (Jay Russell captures Lovett as an extremist moralist,along with portrayals of conservative, dominating male Mike O’Shea and a busybody parish member Betty Heckenbach.)
A visit from Father Lovett to the O’Shea home is the experience of a lifetime for all. It takes a true turn thanks to oldest sister Terri, a married O’Shea who’s staying at her former home due to problems with her husband. (Suzanne Grodner’s Terri is so persuasive and resourceful in her arguments against anyone’s moralist judgements of any O’Shea that she rises above supporting player cast status.) Denouement.
The play quickly moves to the future of the “Incident” events. It’s now, with everyone in their present status as described by Linda. Director Celine Rosenthal deserves much credit for having past and present be quite clear throughout. She has obviously stimulated her actors to try to make the roles authored by Katie Forgette as believable as the era’s major playwright Neil Simon did his creations.
The technical staff maintains Asolo Rep’s sterling reputation for production values and operation, Lighting here seems especially effective and, sometimes with sound accompaniment of changes, probably more nicely comedic than the script mentioned. The huge number of religious props of every size and type everywhere in the O’Shea home was to me, though, a bit disconcerting.
