Escaping the Pitfalls of an Agenda

First, let’s note there are few things sadder than the sight of women abused by men. Those who relegate it to the domain of sexual harassment had better pause, take a breath and reconsider.

Still, any theatergoer has to pause when considering a stage company calling itself Theatre of Hope for Abused Women, currently producing Christine Rosensteel-Savalla’s one-act evening, “A Widow’s Kiss and Two Others.”

What kind of plays would it do, and not do? Would its agenda prevent it from ever staging, for example, “The Taming of the Shrew,” since Shakespeare clearly enjoys Kate’s being brought down a few notches?

Say it were to revive “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Would Stanley’s rough handling of Blanche now be seen as nothing more than brute abuse? Wouldn’t that reduce a complex masterpiece to a slogan?

All of this is a way of noting that any theater company organizing itself around an issue may have a tendency to frame works of art inside the agenda’s theme. Like a prism, a good play is seen differently from various perspectives. Place an umbrella, or issue, over the play and you lose the prismatic effect.

Paradoxically, Rosensteel-Savalla’s one-acts don’t always fit the agenda. In the opener directed by Lewis Hauser, “Cherry Pie,” elderly Margaret (an affecting Natalie Barish) is experiencing some kind of senility, barely recalling that she’s about to marry the much younger Dwight (Robert Boyd, a bit too Snidely Whiplash). He’s clearly a gold digger, and although the play casts Margaret in a sympathetic light as a sweet ol’ gal who’s being used, it also shows that Dwight has probably set his own trap. An abuser he’s not.

Utterly lacking any sense of male violence toward women, “That Kind of Woman” (directed by Bette Rae) is a gentle slice of life from the late 1930s, when it was a very big deal for a woman to drive her husband’s car. That’s what Sarah Kate (Marji Martin) is about to do, taking best friends May (Kate Jo Hughes) and Gertie (Oleeta Igar) along for a trip to nearby Baltimore to see “Gone With the Wind” and have a day on the town.

Sarah Kate works up the nerve, though Gertie says she can’t imagine riding in a car not driven by a man. The sojourn, with a couple of dents collected en route, works out fine, in a charmingly performed fable about the first glimmers of women’s awareness of their own abilities in a man’s world.

Just when it seems that this company’s agenda is off the show’s radar screen, along comes the lugubrious closer, “A Widow’s Kiss,” directed by Hauser as if it were a piece by Edward Albee. The widow is Margie (Kiva Dawson), who has the nervous constitution of a feeble little bird and is haunted by the memory of her dead, abusive husband, Johnny. She recalls night visits by nice, gentlemanly Ethan (Sean Spence), who is everything Johnny was not, including non-Catholic. This disturbs Johnny’s sister, Alma (Margaret Silbar), whose mission is to confirm that Margie is going to hell by dating Ethan.

This is all too quaint by half. Rosensteel-Savalla never identifies when this is taking place--sometime in the ‘60s, apparently, but the attitudes and prejudices make it feel just this side of the Spanish Inquisition. We can see Johnny’s spitefulness in Alma’s brand of monstrousness, but it never connects, because Silbar plays the monster too broadly and because her Alma is old enough to be Margie’s mother, not sister-in-law.

Dawson takes Margie’s feebleness much too far by lowering her voice into the trembly, barely audible range, and in turn lowering the volume on the play’s potential dramatics. That an abuser can live beyond the grave is a very real thing, but making it work on stage is another.

BE THERE

“A Widow’s Kiss and Two Others,” Bitter Truth Theatre, 11050 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7 p.m. Ends July 9. $12. (818) 766-9702, Ext. 4. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.