String of Pearls

by David Anthony Fox

Aren't pearls wonderful? They suit any age and (almost) any outfit. Famously ladylike, yet in the right context, pearls can be very sexy. Why, they're even loyal! It's part of the legend of pearls that with repeated wearing they acquire color and luster from the skin tone of their owner.

The idea of playwright Michele Lowe's charming String of Pearls is that the play follows a single strand of very fine, genuine pearls through more than 30 years. And what an adventure this necklace has! It travels two continents and passes through the hands of two dozen women (some rightful owners, some temporary custodians of various kinds).

Of course, because pearls have a mythology — and because String of Pearls is a piece of theater — the string itself is a dramaturgical device, and secondary to the personal stories it facilitates.

These stories mostly take the form of monologues, and can be sentimental, sexy, or quirky and funny. I find Lowe best at the latter two. Her frankness is refreshing, and her humor offbeat. The more sentimental sequences can border on maudlin (which here is exacerbated by some saccharine George Winston-style piano music), and the themes are ones we've seen before in women's drama: mothers and daughters, whether to pursue a career or stay at home and raise the kids, etc. Still, to Lowe's credit she manages — mostly — to insert enough intriguing surprises in the tale of the necklace that we don't descend into soap-opera bathos.

String calls for four actresses to play all the roles. Of course, this is a Herculean (I guess I mean her-culean!) task that really demands from each a Tracey Ullman-like virtuosity. The four women at People's Light — Alda Cortese, Melanye Finister, Kathryn Peterson and Mary Elizabeth Scallen — are all fine performers, but only Finister has quite the necessary range. With the others, despite substantial help from Marla Jurglanis' costumes, I sometimes lost track of what character I was watching, amid the considerable intricacies of Lowe's plot.

Small quibbles aside, I'm certain that String of Pearls will appeal greatly to audiences. Certainly it has a special resonance for women, but the men present at the performance I saw seemed to have a great time. The show benefits from Abigail Adams' confident and elegantly simple direction.

String of Pearls Through Aug. 15, People's Light and Theatre Company, 39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern, 610-644-3500