Review By Rick Pender

Photo By Sandy Underwood

(L-R) Peggy Cosgrove, Annie Fitzpatrick and Ed Vaughn humanize ETC’s Women Who Steal.

Carter Lewis might not be a genius, but he's pretty damn insightful. If you only get to see one of his two plays currently onstage in Cincinnati - Women Who Steal at Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati (ETC) and Men on the Take at the Cincinnati Playhouse -you're likely to think he really knows his men ... or his women. If you see them both, you'll conclude that he has simply trained his microscope on the human soul and pulled the focus about as sharp as you can possibly make it.

That might make Lewis's writing sound like it's profound and deep. In a way, it is. But it's also dead-on funny. In several instances during ETC's Cincinnati premiere of Women Who Steal you find yourself laughing so hard, it hurts. I don't mean pain from laughing: It's that pain you feel when you know something is real and close to home.

Pain is a familiar feeling for the show's two principal characters, Peggy (played by Peggy Cosgrave, for whom Lewis wrote the role) and Karen (Annie Fitzpatrick). You see, Karen, on the cusp of 40, has had a one-night stand with Peggy's husband, Jack, who's apparently been lusting after the younger woman for years. Each woman is driven from one end of desperation: Peggy, at 50, feels she's lost something (her husband of 23 years), while Karen knows she's failed to find anything (her fling with Stanley meant nothing, and she's pining for a man she's worked with for 12 years feels nothing for her). But this cross-cross of emotions ­ Karen opens the show with a long-winded monologue about the demise of hope ­ is the engine that drives Women Who Steal.

The play works because these women are so profoundly real and human, not in a deep and thoughtful way but full of the flaws and tics we immediately recognize. Without solid acting, Women Who Steal would be empty, but director D. Lynn Meyers has cast the play with actresses who make these women the living, breathing, drinking, grieving characters. Cosgrave gives Peggy a zany, self-deprecating humanity that makes you laugh at her and love her simultaneously, a friendly woman who both knows her depth and doesn't believe in her own worth.

Annie Fitzpatrick is a marvel as Karen. The role was written for Karen Radcliffe, who is playing the female roles in Men on the Take at the Playhouse, but Fitzpatrick completely owns the edgy character in this production. A regular at ETC who typically does impressive work (her portrait of an uptight wife in Dinner With Friends for ETC a year ago won her a Cincinnati Entertainment Award as last season's best actress), Fitzpatrick totally nails this hyper-talker who philosophizes ad nauseam to cover her own feelings of inadequacy. For much of the show, she must overlay a stream of verbosity with a binge of tequila, and she does so in such a convincing manner that it's a bit of a surprise when she straightens up between scenes to move chairs and tables around.

Ed Vaughan plays all the male roles, and distinguishes them nicely ­ from a prissy waiter, to Peggy's good-ol' boyfriend Herb, to Karen's nerdy office-mate Stanley and Peggy's shambling, vulnerable attorney husband Jack. Each character is a target (almost literally) for the drunken women, but without his convincing presence in several scenes, their emotional responses would seem shallow.

About the only thing that's black-and-white about Women Who Steal is Brian c. Mehring's angular set. It uses translucent patterned panels that glow with different colors of light, setting moods from manic car rides and raucous bars to a starlit fishing hole and a somber hospital waiting room.

Women Who Steal is a perceptive exploration of the human condition, with a big emphasis on human. It's sobering and exhilarating at the same time. As she screeches off in Peggy's car at the play's end, Karen says, "I want to look what's excruciating in the face and know that at some point in my life I was alive and kicking."

That's what we've spent two hours watching. And enjoying every minute of it.

E-mail Rick Pender

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