Theatre in Review: Linda (Manhattan Theatre Club)

	Jennifer Ikeda, Molly Ranson, Janie Dee. Photo: Richard Termine

There are rumors of a hurricane in Penelope Skinner's new play, but, when it arrives it proves to be little more than a downpour; even at full force, how could it compete with the play's torrential title character, especially as played by Janie Dee? The last time Dee came to New York, she played a surprisingly winsome robot with dangerously human tendencies in Alan Ayckbourn's Comic Potential. As Linda, she is a very different kind of woman of steel: a marketing executive, working for a beauty products company known as Swan, and armed with a mission.

"I used to be the protagonist of my life and now suddenly I'm starting to feel irrelevant." In the play's uproarious opening scene Linda presents her strategy for selling a new cream, offering these words to sum up the essential dilemma of any woman over the age of 50. And for good reason, she notes: "The simple truth is that, as a woman in the fifty-plus age group, you rarely get marketed to. Products you might want to buy -- and an anti-aging cream is a good standard example -- are marketed to you using models in their thirties, reminding you not of who you could be but of who you were twenty years ago." In Rocco DiSanti's sharply amusing projection design, this comment is illustrated by beauty ads featuring ludicrously unrealistic depictions of so-called middle-aged woman. Even sorrier, she notes, "On the few occasions you do see a woman of your actual age group in an advert, she's either Helen Mirren -- the only older woman still allowed to exist -- or she's selling you meals on wheels."

While Linda is laying bare this sad state of affairs, Skinner is cunningly making clear that Linda, who is 55 and proud of it, does not fall into the category of Bewildered Women of Uncertain Years. Trim, energetic, and gifted with a lioness' mane of blonde hair, she looks smashing in the power suits and sack dresses provided by the costume designer, Jennifer von Mayrhauser. Having entered the workforce as a single mother with no qualifications and no college degree, Linda now rests at the top of her profession. Most unusually, given the industry in which she toils, she has devoted herself to advancing a surprisingly feminist message, having made her mark with a campaign, titled "True Beauty," which is aimed at convincing women that attractiveness comes in all shapes, sizes, and ages. "We're famous for making women feel good," she adds. "I'm not just pitching an ad. I'm starting a revolution!"

In addition to ruling the roost at Swan, Linda is a wife and mother, living in a gleaming home, designed in best magazine-spread style by Walt Spangler. Here, however, there are clouds on the horizon. Neil, Linda's rather sedate spouse, a schoolteacher, is coping with his advancing years by starting a rock band, featuring a nubile girl singer named Stevie. Their fifteen-year-old daughter, Bridget, is planning her drama school audition, and she absolutely refuses to play some wet Shakespearean ingénue such as Ophelia; in fact, she rather covets the role of King Lear. Alice, Linda's daughter from a previous marriage, is, at 25, unemployed, sleeping all day and wandering around the house in a onesie designed to make her look like a skunk; this dangerously whimsical notion masks a darker truth, that Alice never recovered from a ghastly case of Internet shaming nearly a decade earlier. Even at home, Linda is the woman in charge, producing meals and trying to infuse her loved ones with the same can-do enthusiasm that she pitches at her customers.

In any case, Linda's life, built on a foundation of contradictions, comes crashing down. First, her boss, the toad-like Dave, informs her that the anti-aging cream will be marketed to a younger audience and that the product is being handed over to Amy (Molly Griggs), a highly ambitious, blonde little thing who oozes insincerity from every pore, fawning over Linda even as she elbows her out of the limelight. Retreating to home following this indignity, Linda discovers Stevie in her kitchen, wearing nothing but a T-shirt.

Linda, the play, is at its liveliest when Linda, the character, with little left to lose, goes on a truth-telling tear, letting Neil know just what he can do with his rock band and hijacking Amy's first major presentation to push her own ideas and stage a meltdown that bares her personal and professional problems to all her colleagues. Skinner has conceived the character with tremendous sympathy, but she doesn't shy away from her narcissism and all-consuming need for attention. The product Linda markets best is herself, allowing her to comment frequently on her youthful looks, professional awards, and skill at balancing work and family obligations. Skinner makes absolutely clear that Linda is the wrong mother for Alice, having never provided her with the empathy that might have allowed her to leave her past behind; she also shows how, for all her street smarts, Linda has been impossibly idealistic, even naïve, about women in the workplace. At one point, she stares in horror at Amy, whispering, "You're my legacy." It apparently never occurred to her that a younger, more unscrupulous version of herself might come along one day and usurp her position and well-appointed office.

At the same time, Skinner has difficulty keeping the play's subplots sorted -- especially Alice's moment of reckoning with her deep-seated self-hatred -- not least because Linda is the only fully dimensional character in the play. The author also resorts to a frankly unbelievable plot setup -- putting Linda together with a flirty male temp worker who professes a Deepak Chopra-style Buddhism Lite -- in order to entangle her in a history-repeats-itself Internet scandal of the sort that ruined Alice's life. There is more than one scene when the play feels as out of control as its protagonist.

Under Lynne Meadow's direction, Dee delivers a tour de force that keeps Linda watchable at all times. Whether goading Alice to erase her bad memories, dismissing Neil's personal crisis as hopelessly banal, suggestively reminding Dave of their shameful shared past, or turning on Amy with real menace, she is Joan of Arc deprived of an army, holding fast to her burning vision of the world, even as it sears and incinerates everyone with whom she comes into contact. It's a performance as accomplished as it is fearless -- like Linda herself -- demanding that attention be paid.

Molly Griggs, who just appeared in Caroline McGraw's Ultimate Beauty Bible at Page 73 Productions, portraying another deeply shallow denizen of the beauty business, is a pretty formidable antagonist; having planned her life out to the last detail, she announces "I have nightmares about hitting thirty!" Meghann Fahy brings some welcome shadings to the role of Stevie, who is neither as young nor as innocent as she first appears. Molly Ranson is thoroughly convincing as Bridget, whose audition preparations ("I'm thinking of doing Willy Loman") reveal, not entirely happily, that she is her mother's daughter. Jennifer Ikeda, recently seen to better advantage at Manhattan Theatre Club in Vietgone, never quite manages the trick of satirizing Alice's eccentric behavior while isolating her very real pain; if her portrayal is rather confused, it's in part because Skinner never seems to settle on a point of view about her. On the male side, John C. Vennema's Dave is a memorable cameo of pomposity and hypocrisy, but both Donald Sage Mackay and Maurice Jones struggle with the roles of Neil, the erring spouse, and Luke, the office temp with a fatal fondness for selfies.

In all other respects, the production is first-class. Spangler's turntable set keeps spinning, taking us from one location to another in seconds, and Jason Lyons' lighting is smoothly professional. Fitz Patton's original music strikes the right tone; he also provides such effects as a thunderstorm and ambient audience noises.

At its worst, Linda is messily plotted, but in its most striking passages it poses some tough, uncomfortable questions about women, business, and success -- no more so than in the poignant final scene, which flashes back to a moment of triumph for Linda -- in retrospect, the point where everything started to fall apart for her. Very late in the second act, Dave, his patience exhausted, says "Go quietly Linda. Will you please? Go quietly." Somehow, I feel, there's little chance of that. -- David Barbour