‘Body’ reveals search under women’s skins

Mary offers to buy her sister something from the L.L. Bean catalog, but Lili only wants a letter. Such is the nature of relationships in Claire Chafee’s award-winning play “Why We Have a Body.”

The four women characters keep offering each other unwanted, unnecessary things when what they truly search for is emotional connection with other human beings, especially other women.

This lyrical 1993 play is the latest offering from Northern Lights Repertory Theatre and was directed by Marcia Joy Douglas, chair of the University of Maine theater department. Produced in Greenville Junction last month, it will be performed tonight and Saturday in Bangor.

“Why We Have a Body” is a feminist treatise with a sense of humor that explores serious subjects without turning didactic or taking its subject too seriously. Chafee’s women are seekers and searchers by trade. Lili’s a private investigator, Renee, a paleontologist, Eleanor, an archaeologist and Mary, a convenience-store robber.

For the most part, the play is a series of monologues and scenes from these women’s lives. They talk at each other on telephones, they record letters to lovers on tape, they lecture, reminisce and long for that apparently unattainable something they glimpse just beyond the horizon. This makes those fleeting moments when they actually do connect all the more precious, intense and satisfying.

Using slides projected on a screen that acts as a back wall for the stage area, Douglas gives the setting and tone for each scene. Essential set pieces such as a bed, table, chairs and stools put the emphasis squarely where it belongs – on the characters’ emotions. Douglas delicately captures the rhythmic passion of the piece that ebbs and swells like the tide.

Elaine DiFalco Daugherty as the gun-toting Mary is the spark plug of this production. According to her sister, Lili, the 7-Eleven holdup artist has “sailed through practically an armada of therapists virtually unchanged.”

Daugherty brings such energy to the part that she practically glows onstage. Mary, obsessed with Joan of Arc, has feminist nightmares starring literary giants such as Virginia Woolf and Ophelia. Yet, for all her criminal activity and compulsive hero worship, she is, in Daugherty’s skillful hands, tremendously normal.

The actress inhabits Mary with a graceful ease instead of portraying the character. That’s a feat rarely accomplished on area stages. Daugherty brings such intensity to the role that lifts the production and her fellow actresses from very good to near perfection.

Lili, the lesbian private eye, is portrayed by Audrey Minutolo. She is the responsible daughter who’s as solid as her sister is flaky. Lili anticipates and steels herself for everything from work to rejection.

Although Lili professes that she “fell in love four times before the age of eight … and each time it was with a girl …,” Minutolo creates a character uncomfortable in her own skin. Her Lili appears to be so tightly wound that if she ever embraced the passion the character longs for, she’d spin right out of a carefully charted orbit.

Minutolo is best in Lili’s scenes with other characters rather than in her monologues. That seems to go against the playwright’s intent.

The inner secrets of these characters spill out when they address the audience directly. Minutolo’s delivery in these segments, however, gives Lili a coldness that doesn’t always jive with the woman who interacts with her sister and dissolves against her lover’s lips.

Margo Lukens brings to Renee a delightful sense of excitement as the character that discovers and embraces her true nature after a chance encounter with Lili on an airplane. Lukens is superb at portraying the character’s dilemma – torn between a conventional marriage and the discovery of a passion she kept hidden from herself for years.

Mary and Lili’s mother, Eleanor, is the most difficult character in the play. She never interacts with other characters and mostly lectures the audience as if presenting a paper to the National Geographic Society.

Yet, actress Julie Arnold Lisnet brings to the surface a harsh, realistic love for her daughters, although Eleanor does not understand who they’ve become any more than they comprehend the person she’s evolved into.

She tells the audience that since the body replaces each cell entirely every seven years, “then it’s fair to say I was a different person. Someone I no longer am. … And the little girls they were are no longer here. So … it’s just a memory talking to a memory.”

Eleanor is the woman transformed by 1970s feminism, and Arnold captures all the anger and frustration of the generation betrayed by the Cinderella myth and Donna Reed. The actress also gives this mother the clarity of vision that only comes with the hindsight of middle age.

“Why We Have a Body” is a thoughtful, lyrical play brought vividly to life by director Douglas and her actresses. Women of every age and sexual persuasion will spy themselves, their mothers and their daughters in this moving production.

“Why We Have a Body” will be performed at 8 p.m. today and at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 120 Park St., Bangor. For information, call 990-2518.