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Review A Mother, A Daughter, and a Gun
Dodger Stages
November 10, 2005
Morgan Wycks
mwycks@nyconstage.org
A Mother, A Daughter, and a Gun by Barra Grant takes a standard mother-daughter love/hate relationship (a formula so overworked and often unsuccessfully) and puts a small twist on it with ultimately no reward for the audience.
Jess (Veanne Cox) has unwittingly decided to have a party celebrating her winning of a ham. She has also bought a gun with the notion of punishing her husband whom she has discovered is having an affair with a co-worker. The gun first goes off when her mother arrives to help with the party. There is meddling, the arrival of unknown guests and a special guest from Jess' past, a professor to whom she lost her virginity years before. Then there is the arrival of her father and secret past loves are revealed and finally there is the appearance of the husband whose puling apologies don't amount to much.
The twist in this sitcom is the realization that what little love there is between Jess and her mother doesn't compensate for the fact that they truly dislike each other. It would have been better had they gone their separate ways and maybe only dropped an informational line now and then.
It's an idea to be explored but unfortunately in the hands of Ms. Grant one merely wants to escape. Ms. Cox has basically one note to play - desperately whiny exasperation and it palls quickly. Try as she might with some deftly handled physical comedy and an attempt at finding places to display softness, the role won't allow variety. Olympia Dukakis as her mother Beatrice gets the broad comedy well enough but the character is so self-absorbed one doesn't care. In fact, one begins to think if Beatrice is as smart as she thinks she is why hasn't she given up long ago. The gun also has only one note to play - bang, and whenever it gets waved around, one's fingers go to the ears.
The rest of the cast, including George S. Irving, go through their paces under the swift direction of Jonathan Lynn.
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