Pearls are born out of irritants, things we’d rather do without. Some meddling molecule works its way into an oyster and makes a mess of things, and so the oyster does what any respectable venue ought to: It seals the intruder off, locks it up and throws away the key.
In large part, Live Arts seems to’ve done the same with Mother Courage and Her Children following a slightly troubled production of an admittedly demanding play—packed it up and shipped it out. But it’s worth revisiting Mother Courage herself, Live Arts co-founder Francine Smith, who as an actor ingested the tension surrounding Courage and, as director, strung together a fairly brilliant production of Michele Lowe’s String of Pearls.
Lowe’s script runs a 50-year circle around a widow named Beth, a meek woman well into her 70s who is eager to pass along the namesake necklace to her engaged granddaughter, Amy. In what feels like an occasionally uneven series of creative writing exercises, Lowe starts from the pearls’ origin—a gift from Beth’s husband to commemorate the strange and reasonably demeaning sexual act that saved their marriage—and rips through a wealth of owners and half a century in less than two hours. The plot’s appeal to the writer is obvious: It’s a chance to manipulate themes of wealth, beauty and self-worth across 27 characters and a few different social climates. If the occasional vignette lacks a little lustre—a monologue from a shell-shocked Parisian tour guide gets too literal and too erratic—it’s because Lowe’s script for String of Pearls gives each character a depth that can be difficult to resolve in a few pages.
Smith doesn’t have the same luxury as a director but, charged with the none-too-simple task of culling roughly a half-dozen unique characters from each performer, develops each character onstage nearly as reliably as Lowe’s text. Equally worth the praise is the cast of four women who, not counting reliable firestorm Daria Okugawa, are far from regulars on the Live Arts stage. Newcomer Lisa Grant falters a bit in the rushed role of the Parisian but nails the gum-smacking sass of a 1970s suburbanite. Okugawa paces her physical presence to match each of her roles, from the navy-blazered campaign advisor that loses her strand of jewels in a hotel room fling to the meekly excited cleaning woman who discovers the scattered pearls in the same room later. Emily Gibson’s turn as the subdued Beth gives the play’s centerpiece a slow burn, and Karie Miller (see Curtain Calls) turns positive acrobatics as a Boston architect, a crimson-dressed sexpot and a plodding grave digger.
The set—a series of wooden shutters with endless functionality—is another great testament to the execution of Live Arts’ recent “form follows function” mentality (i.e. the there-to-be-demolished living room of The Goat), an incredibly versatile design for the cozy UpStage theater. Succeeding against a challenging, occasionally troubling script like Lowe’s in a small space with a small cast is precisely what we’ve come to demand from Live Arts, but are still so thrilled to receive.