Sisters battle it out in 'Skirmishes'
by Jack Viertel,
Herald theater critic
When the lights come up on the musty Liverpool bed
chamber that is the setting for Catherine Hayes' "Skirmishes," the
hostility flashing through the room is palpable — although no one is
moving. Jean (Tyne Daly) is sitting in a chair, disheveled, exhausted
and silent. Her dying mother (Sylvia Meredith) is asleep in bed or,
for all we know, already dead. Yet what takes place is a silence so
full of implied betrayals, of lost opportunities and of futile
expectations that we can feel it. When Jean's sister Rita (Carolyn
Seymour) enters, the energy redoubles. Before a single word is spoken,
we become terribly afraid of what these people will do to each other
"Skirmishes" charts the battle of two sisters who
are living moment-by-moment at the bedside of a woman who has been
everything to them and is about to be nothing. True, they are married,
and one of them has children, but at the deathbed of a parent, those
can seem like recent, even trivial developments. Mother has shaped
their characters, mother, by preferring one, and then rejecting her,
has laid out a battlefield of anger and recrimination between them
that has extrapolated through the years as their own characters have
taken hold. Mother is no longer responsible, of course. Life has dealt
each sister enough disappointments so that things have gone well
beyond blaming mother: "By the time "Skirmishes" has run its grim,
intricate course, Rita and Jean have been forced to confront the fact
that mother isn't the answer for their anger any more — and that her
death won't make that anger vanish.
Hayes has written an absorbing, sometimes
lacerating drama that is -- strangely, given its subject matter —
never moving, and only rarely emotionally involving. That's only
partially a criticism, for "Skirmishes" is an expertly observed
analysis of one family's poisons interacting. Unlike Marsha Norman's
Pulitzer Prize-winning and somewhat similar " 'night Mother," it never
breaks your heart -- but it is just as relentless and just as
intelligent.
And it has the good fortune to be receiving a
sensitive reading here, anchored by Tyne Daly's stunning portrayal of
Jean, the ungainly, hostile sister who has stayed home and cared for
mother over the years. It is Daly who makes the opening moments of
"Skirmishes" bristle, with her eyes alternating between the downcast
look of defeat and the hard glare of defiance. Looking ungainly and
plain in an old pair of trousers and an oversize cardigan, the actress
seems to have collected the misery of this room inside herself, and to
be spitting it out in bits and pieces. When she cracks, it is
grudgingly, without a hint of willingness to show her emotional side.
Tears for her are a failure of will, not a release. It's a performance
of sustained bravery and sensational control — a better one will be
hard to find for seasons to come.
As her more civilized, more cowardly sister Rita,
Carolyn Seymour holds her own. Rita is a less perfectly observed role,
a somewhat too-typical wife and mother whose loyalty to her children
and husband are, we know well in advance, going to prove to be masks
of a sort. Seymour keeps up the illusion of placidity expertly, and
comes undone pitiably. Oddly, although she is the less-sympathetic of
the two characters, it is her for whom we feel whatever emotional
twinges the playwright eventually allows us.
Sylvia Meredith is a tremendous presence as the
sleeping mother. Although she has only a few lines - and those are all
but incoherent — the sudden coming alive of her face, the blinding
accusation and piercing lack of charity in her eyes is actually
terrifying. It's a performance that makes much out of almost nothing.
Director Sam Weisman has meshed these three actors
into a seamless ensemble, and given the action a hard-edged,
unsentimental tone. There are a few extraneous mannerisms and some of
the long pauses go on so long that we are jettisoned right out of the
playwright's world and back into our own (sitting in the theater,
waiting for an entrance). But despite these lapses and the generally
monochromatic pace that he has imposed on the evening, "Skirmishes"
conveys a consistent atmosphere, and a bleakness of tone for which the
director must in some measure take credit. The room itself is a
triumph of grim color and threadbare fabric (the redoubtable Vicki
Baral and Gerry Hariton have provided the setting and woeful shut-in
lighting to match) and the drama that is played out there is equally
dark, brutal and unrelenting. "Skirmishes" may fail to ignite the
emotions, but it keeps rubbing our noses in the facts of family
failure in a way that is as fascinating as it is repugnant. And if one
has any doubts about the material, Daly's performance all but
eradicates them. The opportunity of seeing this actress in the
intimate surroundings of the Matrix Theatre pretty much outweighs any
other considerations.
