A Feminine Ending (Portland Center Stage)

[February 13th, 2008]

Amanda’s hands are giving her trouble. They seem to have a life of their own, resisting her efforts to appear calm by flitting about her head and belying her internal turmoil. It’s not her fault; she’s fictional. The guilty party here is actress Brooke Bloom, who’s cruelly equipped her character with a remarkable variety of tics of the sort not uncommon among the young and smart and anxious. Amanda rubs her hands together when she has to wait, wipes her eyes when she’s confronted, and her nose when she’s confused. Even when she’s just chatting, there they are, fluttering.

Amanda has much bigger problems than her tics to deal with. Her boyfriend (Peter Katona), an up-and-coming pop star living off her charity, may be sleeping with his manager; her mother (Sharonlee McLean) has contrived a plan to leave her likable but boring husband (Ken Land) of 30 years; and her high-school boyfriend, Billy (Jedadiah Schultz), has moved in next door to her parents. But what really worries Amanda is that no one takes her seriously as an artist or a person. She blames sexism (and the problem of gender in general), but those hands sure as hell aren’t helping.

A Feminine Ending , brought to PCS almost completely intact from its West Coast premiere at South Coast Rep, was the off-Broadway playwright debut of Sarah Treem, a very young (27) graduate of the same Yale program that produced Wendy Wasserstein. While Treem matches and exceeds the pioneering redhead’s ability with one-liners and covers some of her signature territory­­—balancing career and self in an openly patriarchal world—she also runs into the same irksome artificiality that plagues Wassersein’s plays. Both writers have trouble creating characters with distinct voices, and some scenes read more like a personal essay than conversation. Treem has youth on her side, though, and this play is good enough to expect she’ll learn from her predecessor’s mistakes.

Taken on its own terms, A Feminine Ending is a perfectly enjoyable comedy, and this production really succeeds thanks to the work of the ensemble. While Bloom’s performance is the most impressive and effective (those hands again!), the funniest lines all come from McLean, who tempers her usual borderline insanity with a deep sympathy for a woman made batty by domesticity.