Confined by Bathroom Boundaries

With “Scenes Through the Bathroom Window” at the Eclectic Theatre, Stephanie Wiand has taken on perhaps the hardest task for a playwright: to create a plausible drama for a single character going through an experience in real time--none of this cheating by directly addressing the audience--and then multiply it by 10.

Only a few dramatists have ever pulled this off with anything close to brilliance. Wiand’s 10 scenes aren’t to be confused with the standard solo piece, either, where the performer tends to fashion any world he or she wants. Her women have to function as lived characters, strictly operating within the confines of a bathroom.

As we said, this is hard to pull off. Do the characters talk to themselves all the time? If they think to themselves, do we hear them or not? And how many different things can you do in a bathroom that you can actually show onstage?

The effort shows, for good and not-so-good effect, under Christine Devereux’s direction. First, Pauline (Allison Barcott) is a World War II-era mother down on the farm with a bevy of kids, trying to escape the burdens of day-to-day responsibilities by losing herself in glamour magazines. She talks out loud to herself, enough so that we wonder if she’s sane. Actually, she’s just stressed, and certainly not compelling enough as the show’s opener--and then, as the closer--when she appears as a ghost as daughter Jane (Darcy Shean) returns to the farm to clean up after her death.

How to credibly have a character talk is solved in Melissa’s (Elaine Steelman) scene, where she shares a prison cell (including a toilet) with a mute cellmate played by Jacqueline Levy, who appears throughout the evening as a solo chorus soulfully if monochromatically singing relevant songs that bridge the scenes.

Melissa is a fish out of water, a squeaky-clean nice gal whose sudden outburst with a librarian landed her in jail. Again, it doesn’t amount to much, but at least she has someone to talk to (though we wonder why the cellmate says nothing).

Wiand’s larger theme is about the things women must cope with, but she falls into the trap of either being repetitious or depicting her women as victims. Partly because of the play’s self-imposed restrictions, she also lessens the dramatic power of her scenes, as with Randi’s (Rachel Babcock) anticipating that her home pregnancy test will be positive. She talks to her imagined baby (which quickly loses effect) and it’s all too obvious that the test will prove negative.

And although Mary Gallagher is amusing as Elizabeth, locking herself in a bathroom after being caught picking her nose, and Jenni O’Rourke puts her all into Cami, insecure over her husband’s past lover, they both come off as cliched whiners.

Wiand is better with drama than comedy--an Act II scene with a reluctant bride-to-be (Carrie Armstrong) is a wearying series of antics in search of a purpose, and an older gal (Janie Freedman) trying to primp herself for a hot night out is a very thin skit indeed.

Although suicidal Dorothy is overacted by Jennifer Dean, the scene’s creepiness stays with you. Nothing holds more effectively, though, than Gillian Doyle as Victoria, a long-grieving widow who is finally getting ready to date. Both in Doyle’s exquisite, nuanced reading, and in Wiand’s finding a situation in which she can fully dramatize her ideas, this is one scene in the bathroom that suggests what this larger work could be, and how hard it is to pull off.

An applause line must be added for Shep Fitzke’s ingenious modular set pieces, rapidly moved about between scenes by stage managers John P. Kivlen and Biff Wiff’s solid crew.

DETAILS

“Scenes Through the Bathroom Window,” Eclectic Company Theatre, 5312 Laurel Canyon Blvd., North Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends March 11. $15. (818) 475-5105. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.