`The Mineola Twins” is the second half of what playwright Paula Vogel has called her “mammary plays,” the first half being her 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of an incestuous relationship, “How I Learned to Drive.”
Quite different in plotting, the two plays share Vogel’s quirky sense of humor, her acute political awareness, her fondness for playing with time and space in the theater and her liberated view of sexual relationships.
“Twins,” described by its author as “a comedy in six scenes, four dreams and six wigs,” spans the life of female identical twins, Myrna and Myra, from 1953 to 1989, from the Eisenhower to the Bush administrations, with a stopover in the “peace and love” era of 1969.
Alike in looks, the twins are entirely unlike in political and sexual attitudes; and their differences, ending when they climb into the same bed, make up the matter of the drama.
Every actor in the play takes multiple roles. Fortunately for the American Theater Company’s Chicago premiere, the leading roles of Myrna and Myra are played by Kate Buddeke, who abundantly possesses the energy, bite and comic sensibility to make the comedy’s protracted joke work.
Buddeke is a natural for Myra, the lusty, larger-than-life, politically and sexually aggressive half of the pair, but it is as Myrna, fervently playing against type as a wide-eyed, goody-goody upholder of apple pie America, that she really shines.
In the complicated casting that further emphasizes the conservative-vs.-liberal conflict, Marilyn Dodds Frank portrays the lovers, male and female, of the twins, and Jason Denuszek, a young actor of lightning instincts, portrays their sons.
Director Kim Rubinstein’s production also employs two full-service actors, Scott Duff and John Jordan, to change scenes, from malt shop to bedroom to bank lobby to radio studio, in amusingly choreographed (by Billy Siegenfeld) routines, set to sound designer Lindsay Jones’ selection of pop recordings of the era.
Neither Buddeke’s force of personality nor Rubinstein’s array of inventiveness can save the short play from wearing thin and running down in its second act; but the staging, with Buddeke exiting one door as Myra and entering another door a few seconds later as Myrna, does its best to paper over the eventual repetitiveness of the play’s concept.
Vogel’s stage directions suggest “bad wigs” for the twins, and the red-headed examples, beehive to pageboy, that Buddeke wears with such panache fill that bill very nicely. Sasha Doffing’s costumes, especially in the ’50s, are a stitch; and scenic designer Natsu Onoda adds to the fun with a patchwork quilt, dotted with ladies’ undergarments, that cleverly serves as a background for the march of time in the action.
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“The Mineola Twins”
When: Through May 27
Where: American Theater Company, 1909 W. Byron St.
Phone: 773-929-1031
