Word: sada
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Three of the playlets revolve around sisters, and the fourth concerns their mother, with all of the roles being played by Sada Thompson. The action of each is set in a kitchen some time during the day before Thanksgiving. The holiday creates an opportunity for the women to reminisce and sum up their lives...
None of the O. Henryesque twists would stir an audience much if Sada Thompson was not a masterly actress. Some 42 years ago, she was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and her apprenticeship has included years of regional repertory work, doing lead parts in The Three Sisters, Macbeth, The Rose Tattoo and plays of like caliber. Two seasons ago she won an award as best off-Broadway actress of the year, playing the bitter, slatternly mother in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds...
Consider then Act I: It's nine o'clock in the morning as Emily (played by Sada Thompson, who'll also assume the other three female roles as the play progresses) moves into her new, four-room apartment with the aid of Frank, her mover (Nicholas Coster). Emily has lost her husband. A widow then? Frank asks. "Well, I don't mean I lost him on the street," she quickly answers. I am, myself, divorced, Frank hastens to explain. And with that the two enter into a conspiracy to fill each other in on the details of their lives before...
There is a wealth of low-key truths lurking in Furth's play--for here, unlike in a Simon comedy, you don't see the gags being cranked out and tossed at you; the revelations instead seem to slip out as if by mistake--which Sada Thompson manages beautifully. Her characterizations are triumphs of inflection. You never for a minute doubt that her women are all relatives under the skin, yet there is never any danger of the four characters melting into one. All the men involved--particularly Oakland, Bain and Haines--approach their roles with a similar respect...
...metaphor with which Playwright Paul Zindel links the worlds of botany and humanity. Some of the marigolds are withered, some aberrant, and some blossom handsomely. So it is in the family. It is difficult to know where praise of Marigolds should begin or end, and how to contain it. Sada Thompson may already have stolen the Obie award. Her acerb slatternly mother, gobbling cigarettes and guzzling whisky, might simply have been a mutilating monster-except that every other word and gesture reveals the maimed woman inside. The daughter roles are charged with compassion by Levitt and Payton-Wright...