Killing Women

It’s not a bad play. A lot of things about Killing Women are impressive, particularly when you hear that it’s a reworking of a five-year-old script that premiered at Washington University in St. Louis, where Wegrzyn and most of the Theatre Seven principals went to college. See it through that lens, and it’s easier to overlook some of the glaring plot holes in Wegrzyn’s convoluted, darkly comic story of a hardened female assassin, Abby, who doesn’t want to kill the wife and daughter of her murdered colleague, and so opts to train the widow to be a killer instead. Gloss over the unfinished texture—parts of which may have needed another draft; the abrupt, unearned ending; stick-figure characters like the male boss—because the good parts are really good. Take, for instance,  the distinctive female characters and killer lines, like Abby’s shutdown of perky, Cosmo-reading chatterbox Gwen: “You make me wish I was autistic.” You can sense the wit, hear the beginnings of the same distinctive rhythm that drives Wegrzyn’s The Butcher of Baraboo.

No, it’s not a bad play. But it’s not a good production. You hear Wegrzyn’s rhythm, but only in the way it’s fighting against the awkward pacing established (or rather not established) by Golden and the massively miscast actors (Wegrzyn’s script might have been better served by casting outside the ensemble). One wonders if the same missteps were to blame for last spring’s critically lambasted New York production of Baraboo—a decent script, gone about all wrong.—Kris Vire