THEATER REVIEW : ‘Southern Girls’ Provides Thoughtful Look at Race

A common Southern background and a shared sense of outrage at continued racial polarization compelled playwrights Sheri Bailey and Dura Temple to pool their respective black and white experiences in “Southern Girls.”

Putting an affecting and authentic human face on racial conflict, this hard-hitting collaborative work receives sensitive and thoughtful staging by David Catanzarite for Pacific Resident Theatre Ensemble at Santa Monica’s Powerhouse Theatre. Minor construction problems notwithstanding, it’s a worthwhile flesh-and-blood antidote to the heart-numbing, abstract debate over minority quotas, IQ statistics and welfare funding.

Tracing the lives of six women--three white and three black--from childhood through middle age, the play compresses the last three decades of social turmoil into a tightly focused narrative set in a small Alabama town. Snapshot scenes dovetail the characters’ personal turning points with larger historical events--notably the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement.

While the presentational premise and even some of the content are more than a tad reminiscent of “Vanities,” Jack Heifner’s often-revived Southern belle saga, Bailey and Temple bring a broader social context and a heightened urgency to their work. It’s a chronicle of the boomer generation’s cycle through questioned injustice, fiery idealism and eventual frustration with the reality that change can never keep pace with expectation.

The well-cast ensemble members all turn in commendable performances, but it is the rebel characters who provide the stellar opportunities--for Joan Chodorow as the white girl driven by conscience to break with her expected allegiances to race and class, and for Veronica Thompson as the poor black who chooses to abort a child she can’t afford to raise in order to pursue a law degree.

At the other extreme are two conformists. The aspiring lawyer’s sister (Ruth Hurdle) is a baby factory who trades her own possibilities for domestic drudgery. A small-minded bigot (Terry Davis) comes dangerously close to being an all-out hissable villain, but redeems her humanity through tragic irony, discovering too late the hollowness of sugar-coated dreams.

Confused and caught in the middle--and linked by a shared rift in the barrier between races--are a neurotic child-abuse victim (Betsy Zang) and her half-sister, a light-skinned dancer (Nancy Cheryll Davis) who dissipates herself in tawdry affairs (and, as written, proves an expositional mess).

Despite its emotional impact, “Southern Girls” at times runs up against the limits of collaborative playwrighting. The geometrical plot symmetry and neatly framed moral dilemmas, however elegant, are a little too pat for the sloppiness of real life--a case of form rigidly dictating content that probably wouldn’t occur in the hands of a single author.

But it’s a small price to pay for this powerful fusion of two eloquent voices. * “Southern Girls,” Powerhouse Theatre, 3116 2nd St., Santa Monica. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. Ends June 11. $15. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.