'When We Were Young and Unafraid,' theater review
An ambitious but murky drama about women and violence, 'When We Were Young and Unafraid' unfolds in 1972 on a Puget Sound island where the waters are tricky to navigate and drenched in legend.
'They said there was a goddess living beneath the current,' says Agnes, a sort of real-life goddess on dry land. By day, she operates a B&B and serves muffins with a smile. By night, she runs a secret shelter for battered women.
Between changing beds and stitching gashed faces, ex-nurse Agnes (Cherry Jones, low-key and believable) has raised whip-smart and independent 16-year-old Penny (Morgan Saylor). This teen is obsessed with getting into Yale instead of going to prom like all the popular girls.
Enter Mary Anne (Zoe Kazan), who's on the lam from her husband and his fists. Even with a bleeding face, she yearns for her mate and picks up the aroma of cardamom in a muffin with one sniff. She's just that sort of domesticated woman. She's also a complete 180 from Hannah (Cherise Boothe), a loner searching for an all-female community on the island.
In a few days, Mary Anne has bewitched guitar-strumming Paul, a B&B visitor (Patch Darragh, in weirdo Crispin Glover mode), and brings out the dangerous boy-crazy in Penny. Hannah and Agnes get closer.
Writer Sarah Treem ('In Treatment,' 'House of Cards') gets credit for creating a work that's unpredictable - but loses much of it for a play that's not all that cohesive or clear in its point. Director Pam MacKinnon's staging for Manhattan Theatre Club can't resolve that.
At its best, the play presents a group portrait of colliding lives at a pivotal time in pre-Roe v. Wade America. And it asks big questions about where women have been and where they're headed - but in the end, this play just goes in circles.
jdziemianowicz@nydailynews.com
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