STAGE REVIEW : A Family at War in ‘Scream and Shout’

Bad blood is thicker than water. That’s the gist of Sharman Macdonald’s “When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout” at South Coast Repertory, an easy play to dislike.

Indeed, one woman disliked it so much that she walked out on it Saturday night, slamming the door to dramatize her displeasure. What awful language! And in a play about women!

My problem was the characters. Let’s describe them. Morag (Dana Ivey) is in a still-handsome woman in her 60s without anyone in her life but her daughter Fiona (Elizabeth McGovern), who is only occasionally in her life.

This weekend they are sitting on a beach in the small Scottish town where they once lived, trying to have a pleasant reunion. At least Morag is trying. Fiona is, as usual, sulking. Won’t even discuss the fact that she’s still unmarried at 32. All Morag wants from her is a grandchild. Is that too much to ask?

The irony, as we find in the second act, is that the daughter has already given her a grandchild--which, being illegitimate, didn’t count. We also see that the daughter was only 14 at the time. She had the baby to keep her mother from running out on her for a man. It worked. But of course the baby had to be given away.

So everybody got thwarted. If this were a Beth Henley play, there would be recriminations all over the lot, and a final family embrace. But Morag and Fiona prefer to sit on their anger, letting it flare only now and then. Giving way to it would be a victory for the other side.

This is realistic, and probably very Scottish, but it’s also frustrating for the viewer who likes people in plays to make breakthroughs. It also contributes to the sense that both Morag and Fiona are essentially petty people, not worth all that much emotional investment. The play works as a sort of worst-case study of a mother-daughter relationship, but a case study is precisely the effect.

That may be what playwright Macdonald had in mind. She clearly didn’t want to write a frilly play. The sex is there to remind us that women have bodies, as men do, and the coldness is there to remind us that women know how to make themselves emotionally unavailable, as men do. That understood, there’s something ungiving about Macdonald’s attitude toward her characters, as if she herself didn’t give tuppence for them.

It would be interesting to know how they were played at the Bush Theatre in London, the play’s first venue. The director here is the same, Simon Stokes. He allows his cast to make discoveries, but also instructs them to keep the lid on--to take the risk that the audience won’t find them agreeable.

This takes discipline for American actors, but the order is obeyed. Ivey as Morag resists the temptation to play her as a colorful monster mother. She says some outrageous things, but she is too concerned with the proprieties to really cut loose and be her own person. We see why the daughter can’t afford to be in her orbit for more than a weekend.

McGovern suggests that the daughter is still recovering from a disastrously selfish childhood.

(Vividly re-enacted in the scenes with Katherine Romaine as her best friend and Bruce Norris as the boy who got her pregnant--a scene that really would have frosted the woman who walked out early.)

Today, on the beach with her mother, she is there and yet not there, a complicated state for an actor to convey. There may be more going on in this story than a play can get at. Perhaps it really wants to be a novel.

Plays at 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, through Dec. 10. Performances Tuesdays-Fridays at8:30 p.m., Saturdays at 3 and 8:30 p.m. and Sundays at 3 and 8 p.m. Tickets $20-$27. (714) 957-4033.