By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Even if you didn’t go to Pemberton College, you’ll probably know with the women from its championship swim squad.
They are a familiar line up of southern female types – overachiever, perfectionist alpha woman, sex-obsessed diva, screwball redneck, and cheerful naif. These archetypes mean the writer, Jones Hope Wooten, doesn’t have to spend time establishing characters. You know, sometimes before the character enters, where they fit in this theatrical ecosystem.
The fun is seeing what twists the script and the particular cast can put on them, so we see them a little fresh.
Monica Hiris as Vernadette fiercely defends the virtue of biscuits as Ellen Bean Larabee (left) and Nicole Tuttle look on.
The Black Swamp Players’ production of “The Dixie Swim Club” opens Friday, April 28, at 8 p.m. in the First United Methodist Church, 1526 E. Wooster St., Bowling Green. The play continues Saturday (April 28), Friday, May 5, and Saturday, May 6, all at 8 p.m. with Sunday matinees April 30 and May 7 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $12 and $10 for students and seniors at Grounds for Thought or at: https://www.blackswampplayers.org/.
Directed by Aggie Alt, in her first effort for the Players, “The Dixie Swim Club” is set on a vacation house on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Members of the swim club have reunited here for more than 20 years when we first encounter them. Now 44 they are facing the various discontents and joys of middle age, and realizing those are sometimes hard to distinguish. One of the characters even shows up pregnant. That birth gives the play its circle-of-life feel. When the play ends 33 years after this first scene, one of the five team members is no longer with them.
The characters are the focus here with no real overarching plot, just the repartee, most often comic, about love, lusts, marriage, diseases, aging, and parenthood. The characters don’t develop as much as they reveal themselves slowly over time.
The cast is a mix of the Players’ usual suspects and newcomers to the troupe.
Players regular Deb Weiser plays Sheree Hollinger, who is still the team captain even after more than 20 years. She organizes the whole thing, and brings health food for her friends, who are quite unappreciative. Sheree married the coach’s son, and is still in touch with him. Her children, it seems, are perfect.
Deb Shaffer plays the high-powered attorney, who has let her personal life slide. Credit Shaffer for bringing real warmth to the character and making her neither shrill nor pathetic, just sharp tongued and realistic.
Nicole Tuttle is new to the Players, but not to local stages. She’s performed in shows at the university as well as with Lionface Productions. She plays the sex-obsessed, serial cosmetic surgery patient, Lexie. As we skip forward in five year intervals she’s always going through another divorce. Her former teammates suffer empathy exhaustion.
From left, Jeri Neal (Ellen Bean Larabee) models a suit for Dinah (Deb Shaffer) and Sheree (Deb Weiser).
This is my first time seeing Ellen Bean Larabee who plays Jeri Neal, a former nun whose life has taken a drastic turn. Now she and her friends are intent on remedying her deep-seated naiveté.
Finally there’s Monica Hiris as Vernadette whose life is the mirror image of Sheri. At one point, Lexie says to her that her life is just a series of country songs.
“And the hits just keep on coming,” Vernadette says.
Her son is in and out of prison, and her daughter runs off with a cult. Her husband is frequently unemployed, and, at one point, he takes drastic action to stop her from attending.
She’s always banged up in some way, though the play never indicates this may be her husband’s work.
From this mess of a life come some of the funniest lines that Hiris delivers with laconic timing. “I never knew what real happiness was until I got married,” she says wistfully, “and then it was too late.”
With Alt’s guidance, the cast has a fine sense of camaraderie. As much as they bicker and pick at each other, the bonds of friendship are clear and reveal themselves in new ways with every scene.
Theatergoers will certainly enjoy their company.
