Frontiers, which follows roughly 30 pioneer women in Kansas, around the turn of the century, is a celebration of women and their raw strength that’s never shrill, strident, or exclusive. What a pleasure to see a show about women that doesn’t sacrifice stagecraft and solid story telling to an agenda. However important an agenda may be, it’s rarely well served by characters who act only as mouthpieces or dialogue that’s thinly veiled rhetoric. Of the half dozen or so plays I’ve seen in the last year that dealt with “women’s issues,” none succeeded in presenting flesh-and-blood women as well as this series of monologues and sketches written by four women (Valery Daemke, Doreen Dunn, Kathleen Gaffney, and Nancy Sellin).
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It is 1847, and a fever of westward expansion finds a number of women facing the challenge of life on the Kansas prairie. A young woman from the east eagerly embarks on a two-month journey by stagecoach, meeting a cowboy who lives up to her romantic notions and discovering life and color in a landscape that had only been described to her as bleak. A gentle Missouri bride travels to meet a groom she’s never met, contemplating a future she has no control over. A girl on a wagon train experiences her first kiss and moments later watches a girlfriend die when her bonnet ribbon brushes against a skittish horse. An intrepid Englishwoman and her brothers fail in their naive attempts to raise crops (“We have planted our little seeds and are now waiting for the food to appear”) and embark on an equally disastrous buffalo hunt. An Irish wife is left alone for weeks in the middle of a drought while her husband goes in search of water. A woman raised in the east observes her children playing in the shadow of a recently lynched man and prays to God to send her back home. “But Mama,” one of her children reminds her, “you are home.” While none of these situations is particularly relevant today, the women’s quiet power and tenacity as they battle drought, grasshoppers, tornadoes, illness, and isolation with a beguilingly human mixture of ferocity, humor, and resignation is inspiring.
This is the case with Folio’s late-night offering, Theatre of the Film Noir by George F. Walker. It’s a smoky, dimly lighted mood piece with much to offer in the way of clever dialogue–but ultimately very little to say. Yet Folio has delivered the performances, and no one can deny that the show is a lot of fun.
