Asolo's Producing Artistic Director has saved his company's best-of-season for its end, a play with poetic ambiguity in a crystalline, compelling production. A relationship grows between a writer/teacher who begins as a tough, almost unwilling mentor and a student who mirrors her own talent when younger but is otherwise rapturously enthusiastic and pushy. The two become colleagues and, in mother-to-daughter fashion, share their feelings and experiences. Then, near her professional and physical end, Ruth feels her life and talent usurped by Lisa with a first novel. Yet earlier she maintained, "If you've got a story to tell, do it. Don't flinch." So hasn't Lisa simply heeded Ruth's advice?
Ruth also maintained telling a story dissipates the need to write it, so did Lisa just assume Ruth would never use the voice and stories Lisa expropriated? Still, Ruth did claim that she hadn't written of the poet with whom she had a seminal affair because, "some things you don't touch." And she'd questioned Lisa being needlessly hurtful to her father via a story as well as her way of going around Ruth to get published. Isa Thomas is so true as Ruth and, as a teacher, so specific with bountiful good advice, one tends to side with her. Yet Lisa must be understood as a not atypical postmodern feminist, thinking she has "honored" Ruth by succeeding under her tutelage. Besides, Lisa accuses Ruth in reference to grabbing a story that grabs a writer, "You taught me to be ruthless."
Rebecca Baldwin convincingly changes from pretty-in-pink, gushy Lisa, worried about Woody Allen's sexual morality, to a shimmery-black-clad, subdued oral interpreter of the opening of her roman a clef. The balance is tipped a bit against her by what she reads of it, evocative (like Margulies' play) but overwritten. With its tasteful prints, art glass lighting shades, abundant book shelves and spaces for morebooks and papers on the solid wood furnishings, Ruth's paneled apartment bespeaks her work. It's no-nonsense comfortable, like her pants suits. One leaves it having learned. And loved. But not sans regrets.
