Teen angle

A Girl's Life takes on adolescence

by Carolyn Clay

A GIRL'S LIFE, by Kathleen Tolan. Directed by Barry Edelstein. Set design by Narelle Sissons. Costumes by Marcia Zammarelli. Lighting by Jeff Nellis. Sound by Kurt Kellenberger. Original music by Mark Humble. With Ellen McLaughlin, William Damkoehler, Rebecca Hart, Bianca DiSarro, Nigel Gore, Sharon Ambielli, and Chris Roblee. Part of the Providence New Play Festival, at Trinity Repertory Company through March 22.

You can't drive a stake through the heart of the abortion issue. The controversy rages within individuals as well as between strident groups. In A Girl's Life, Kathleen Tolan works the hot-button subject into a crazy quilt of family drama, public forum, snappy surrealism, and garage rock. In its world premiere at Trinity Repertory Company, as part of the second Providence New Play Festival, the quilt's a bit patchy and could use some more stuffing. But it's wrapped around one of the truest portrayals of a bright, conflicted adolescent I can recall. Move over, Claire Danes's Angela on TV's My So-Called Life.

Many theater works make a point of spelling out both plot and message. A Girl's Life director Barry Edelstein is fresh off a successful New York revival of such a one: Arthur Miller's All My Sons. Tolan is nowhere near as neat, or as morally certitudinous, as Miller. In the spirit of other writers championed by Trinity Rep artistic director Oskar Eustis, among them Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and Lisa Loomer (The Waiting Room), she mixes politics, melodrama, and comedy in a way that's provocative and a little loopy. For example, the dramatis personae of A Girl's Life includes, in addition to the obligatory nuclear family, Louis Pasteur and a stigmata-dripping St. Catherine -- to whom the 17-year-old, punk-aspiring central character remarks companionably, "I've thought about getting my body pierced."

This sloppy but troubling work begins and ends with a public conference on world health, its keynote speaker a French scientist named Lernoux, who has pioneered a progesterone inhibitor that is, in effect, an abortion pill. A suave scientific type, he tries to hold his own amid a chaos of shouts from pro-lifers, dybbuks in the sound system, and rude newshounds in search of the more personal story that unfolds in the middle of the play -- on a set that's a muddle of skewed domesticity, a modest American home whose kitchen, paneled parlor, garage, and immediate environs (including a full-size automobile) seem to have been tossed into a blender.

The inhabitants of this jumble include father Ken, a physician and upright Catholic who nonetheless works for the drug company that's developing the abortion pill; mom Bev, a nurse who is juggling home, work, and the alienation of her elder daughter; 17-year-old Jen, an aspiring rock musician immersed in issues of art and identity; and 11-year-old Jesse, a bouncy, gregarious student who really should put a sock in it. Also on hand are bandmate Sheila, who provides a performance-art-edged percussive accouterment to Jen's pose as a wanna-be Ani DiFranco; and Terry, a young religious zealot who spends his off-hours parked in front of the house praying for Ken's soul.

Some of what Tolan does to mix and match these characters is plausible; some is not. If we are to believe that sullen rocker Jen takes up with twentysomething pro-lifer Terry, more must be made of their previous acquaintance. And I doubt that anything will make viable the barroom encounter between Lernoux and Bev that results in mom's sexual and intellectual reawakening. But Tolan creates in Jen and Bev -- played to quirky perfection by actor/musician Rebecca Hart, of the band the Rebecca Hart Project, and the edgy Ellen McLaughlin -- a complex adolescent and unnerved mother who are disarmingly believable, their longing to connect palpable between the oft-angry lines. Ultimately, Jen turns in a pinch not to her concerned, obtuse parents but to Sheila, with predictable, tragic results.

Tolan's integration of rock music into the work is an intriguing idea. Jen's compositions aren't much good (which may be the point). But the abrupt tunes do demonstrate conflicted feelings, of alienation versus connection, romantic yearning versus "deep thoughts." And they're hostilely or hauntingly rendered by Hart, with just a soupçon of irony (and pleasing harmony thrown in by Sharon Ambielli, an upbeat if offbeat Sheila). The music also serves as metaphor for the play's talk of moral order and chaos, Jen's angry strummings standing in contrast to a strand of Bach that's increasingly pulled apart as the play progresses.

A Girl's Life is being given a winning production, anchored by the appealing Hart, terrific McLaughlin, and dependable William Damkoehler. It's definitely a work in progress, though. The pedantic father's religious/professional compromise needs to be explored, as does the mix of loneliness and sexual desire that leads to the unlikely relationship between Jen and Terry. (As it stands, Bev's sexual neediness gets more attention than Jen's.) And the play's linkage of public forum with personal tragedy seems just a little tawdry. Still, Tolan has created an uncanny replica of a chafing, talented, smart-ass teen. And she understands that the abortion question can't be reduced to the rhetoric of opposing bumper stickers.