Matters Domestic: it ain’t bliss, but the drama is

Matters Domestic

Tell me, how fucked up is your family? But you make it OK, right? Because there are degrees of fucked up and we work with what we’ve got.

Would Mom have aborted you if it were legal? If she found out about the pregnancy soon enough?  Ever wonder how different her life would have been if she’d finished that MBA instead of raising you? She thinks about it every day.

Does your pregnant daughter want to keep her baby so she can stay at home, close to you and share mothering duties? Is she a virgin — unless you count the operation at the sperm donor clinic?

DNA and Download, the two vignettes by Barbara Ellison that make Matters Domestic, probe the obligations, desires and scarifies of the contracts we enter with family. In these plays, the contracts hinge on biology and business.

In each production, we’re given just enough detail at just the right time to stay hooked. The tension was marvelous, and I was engaged and curious. What’s next, I kept thinking. The stakes were raised every few lines and the dialogue was nuanced but loaded.

Like a psychological, postmodern slap in the style of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, the domestic power games of Ellison’s scripts deal with sex and control and ownership. The playwright puts women in the driver’s seat, and it’s rewarding to see original, candid and well-performed female roles in both vignettes.

In DNA, a 10-minute short, the banter escalates between single mother Amanda (Lisa Dahling) and teenage daughter Victoria (Lesli Brownlee), until both admit their secrets. (To the credit of playwright and both actors, the misunderstandings are very well written and executed.) By the end, we’re left on the cusp of what will become their relationship; we witness two people launch themselves from the edge, but we don’t see the suicide. We can still wonder at their survival.

For Download, we’re confronted with the question asked by many women: can we have it all? The Woman (Nancy Sivak) takes a unique approach to fulfilling the home / work fantasy, but The Man (William MacDonald) has already learned that we can’t have it both ways. But the fantasy persists. What’s marriage, he asks: the exchange of sex and comfort for security and resources. More unexpected than the contract shared between these two characters: the tenderness. And like DNA, Download leaves us on the precipice of their future.
Matters Domestic is great theatre.

Also, props to the production team and set designer John R. Taylor for stage-craft economy.
 
For showtime information go here.

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By Megan Stewart