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Ten Cent Night
Billie Holiday referred to the blues, her painful but perfected genre, as “a good woman feelin’ bad.” By that standard, Wegrzyn’s new work, about four down-and-out orphaned siblings whose blues-legend father took his own life, is what you’d call a blues play. The young author of plays including Diversey Harbor and Killing Women regularly creates enormously likable, self-deprecating characters grappling with miserable situations. In particular, the three young ladies of the Finley clan are all good women feelin’ bad. But as seductively as they make their troubles come across, it’s tough not to wish Wegrzyn had given them fewer verses to sing. At 90 minutes, this would’ve been a budding new play that hints yet again at Wegrzyn’s exciting career. At three hours, it’s more like a rambling drunk in a roadside juke joint.
Incredible plot points aside—there’s mistaken identity, secret incest and a kindly, aging hooker with the keys to the family’s problems—the playwright explores an American family mythos that’s well-trod territory. Namely, the children of celebrities are left with empty legacies and broken dreams. Yet it’s impressive how she’s retrofitted her voice to it, applying her brittle, acerbic worldview to a familiar formula like dry rub on beef.
But more time has gone into folksy, past-tense remembrances and (another of this writer’s idiosyncrasies) tying off every dangling plot thread than letting the story speak, or rather sing, for itself. That said, Shavzin’s otherwise plain production has three exceptional performances in Carini as the sister with the wandering heart and shit-kicking authority, Patten as the baby sis with literal and figurative heart problems, and wonderful Kidwell as the daughter who gets bubkes for holding down the family fort.
