A Family Relationship Evolves in ‘Girl’

“I was desperate to have a second child,” explained Scottish playwright Sharman Macdonald of the impetus for “When I Was a Girl, I Used to Scream and Shout,” which had its American premiere on Friday,(10) at South Coast Repertory. “My husband told me that if I sold a script, I could have it. If not, it was no go.” The results of Macdonald’s determination were not only a successful play, but a newly completed screenplay of “Scream and Shout”--and a 4-year-old daughter, Keira.

The basis of the play--the difficult, loving, ever-evolving relationship between a mother and daughter--was prompted by a play she’d seen about female sexuality. “I thought (the writer) had gotten it all wrong,” Macdonald said. A snippet of conversation between her then-4-year-old son and his friend further sparked the idea. “They were going upstairs to play the games little boys do. It flung me back to my own childhood, the games little girls play.”

The piece also takes its emotional cues from Macdonald’s own experiences at 17, when her engineer father--unable to find work in Scotland--relocated to the Middle East. “I was very glad to see (my parents) go,” she said. “But a friend of mine then was in the same situation in England, except that she was desperate to keep her parents from going.” While acknowledging a strong female dynamic in the work, ‘I think a man can understand it--and should. Maybe this play will help them.”

Dana Ivey and Elizabeth McGovern play mother and daughter. Simon Stokes, who staged the original British production, directs.

HORSEFEATHERS: “Lu/Lou,” Anna Nicholas’ sexy treatise on human and animal love, has its world premiere this weekend at the Lex Theatre in Hollywood. Dorothy Lyman directs.

“It evolved out of Padua Hills’ (writing workshop) in ‘88, when David Henry Hwang was teaching,” noted Nicholas. “The exercise was to do a piece on breaking rituals. The ritual in the play is an argument between a husband and wife--Lou and Lu (a horse trainer). The only way he can please her is by behaving like a horse: getting down on hands and knees, whinnying and pawing the ground. The sex play a la animals is a symbol for their lack of communication.”

It gets kinkier. “Lu tries to have sex with a horse, because she’s not happy with people. You know, there’s a certain amount of unconditional love you get from animals. And people--especially immature people like me--are always wanting to find that unconditional love with people. So since Lu’s a sexually active person, she wants to see if she can fill her life with animals--if they’re all she needs. She comes to realize that in spite of all the disagreements and disapproval, she’d rather be with people.”

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: Lev Dodin’s 41-actor staging of Fyodor Abramov’s “Brothers and Sisters” is having its American premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe, as part of the city’s Soviet Arts Festival.

Said Dan Sullivan in The Times: “The surprise of this two-part, six-hour saga is that it’s not more of an ordeal. (It) is, first of all and quite consciously, a theater piece--an entertainment . . . . Without being quite a spectacular, it consistently rewards the eye and ear.”

Daily Variety’s Kathleen O’Steen found it “both compelling and at times melodramatic . . . the Russian equivalent of ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ Instead of migrant farm workers in California, the main characters are peasants on collective farms; instead of ruthless landowners, there are the inhumane dictates of Stalinist Russia.”

From Charles Marowitz in the Herald Examiner: “The real fascination is watching Soviet actors delineate the cultural and emotional feel of the peasantry; how they cry, sing, struggle and interact, rather than how they grapple with the crucifying hardships imposed upon them by Stalin’s inhuman quota system.”