Also this issue:

Material Girls
The Female Funny Fest might make you think, but it wants to make you laugh.
-Debra Auspitz

Brittle Women
-Susan Hagen

The Real Thing
-David Warner

Pal Around
-Steve Cohen

Human, Nature
-Janet Anderson

War on War
-Sam Adams

Sons Also Rises
-David Anthony Fox

Due Cause
-Frank Lewis

October 31-November 6, 2002

theater

Eye Opener

Motherâs courage: (l-r) Cora (Catherine K. Slusar) and

May (Claudia Robinson) contemplate politics, ethics

and filicide in <i>Going to St. Ives</i>.

Motherâs courage: (l-r) Cora (Catherine K. Slusar) and May (Claudia Robinson) contemplate politics, ethics and filicide in Going to St. Ives.

by Toby Zinman

I haven’t seen an entrance this spectacular in years. Claudia Robinson takes the stage, in full African garb, with a profile and a bearing as regal as pharaonic sculpture; May N’Kame, mother of a monstrous African emperor, is having tea (“the one essential bodily fluid of the English”) with Dr. Cora Gage (Catherine K. Slusar), a world-famous ophthalmologist.

May is there not to drink tea, nor even to discuss her impending eye surgery, but to ask the doctor for a pharmaceutical weapon with which to kill her son and end his bloody dictatorship. The moral dilemma is thus established early on: a doctor who is dedicated to saving lives but who also abhors, as any morally responsible person would, the Emperor's savage reign. The quid pro quo here is that Cora wants May to intervene with her son and have four doctors he has imprisoned released. May wants the poison. The shared experience that links these two radically different women is both the private life of motherhood and the public life of political responsibility.

To reveal what happens -- the decisions, the struggles, the outcomes -- would be to spoil the play's mystery and make its complex emotional logic seem easy. Suffice it to say that the play is emotionally and intellectually engrossing, and if the second act is overwritten and overlong, Going to St. Ives is nevertheless a witty and weighty drama. The play's issue is the moral debate about whether murder is ever justifiable, complicated on one hand by a brutal reign of terror, and by the Hippocratic oath on the other. Global racism is, of course, another issue, like the First World's "great communal coma" about the Third World, and how there can be no civilization when "half the world turns it back while the other half bleeds."

Playwright Lee Blessing's best known play is A Walk in the Woods, another conversation play concerned with moral dilemmas, and another two-hander, although that one is for two male actors. That Going to St. Ives is for two female actors allows Blessing to make the primal mystery of maternal love its moral and psychological hinge. Cora has an impassioned and remarkably cliche-free monologue about becoming a physician, about the love of life on its most fundamental level, while May delivers a dazzling monologue on her love and hatred for her son.

Seth Rozin directs two fine performances: Slusar, an actress well-known to Philadelphia audiences, has the thankless task of playing English decency opposite African suffering and majesty, while wearing sensible western suits next to gorgeous headwraps and dashikis (costumes by Karen Ann Ledger). Slusar opts for tense pacing and finger-pointing as Cora's signatures, while Robinson gives May imperious elegance through the tilt of her head and superb posture. In Act II, when she is under house arrest in Africa, Robinson's May looks plainer, more pained, more human, but she is, finally, no less regal. The sets by Nick Embree make much of the small stage, and Peter Whinnery nicely lights his English parlor with cool blue/gray and the African garden with warm yellows.