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Orange Flower Water by Craig Wright is over 20 years old, but except for a reference to a video rental store and the use of a landline, it could be happening now. It concerns two marriages rearranged by an affair. The new theater company 100 Lives Repertory’s take on Orange Flower Water in the cozy black box Spotlight Theatre, running through Oct. 12, feels just as present in this moment.
Orange Flower Water isn’t so different from a Grecian tragedy. It poses several questions, and the audience experiences an emotional catharsis along with the actor-characters. Blaine Palmer, who co-directed Orange Flower Water with Annie Kehoe, says 100 Lives chose the play in part because the company “really loved the questions the play asks,” especially “Is love worth it?” That’s a tough one, but is it worth it to see a play with potentially triggering subject matter? Why, yes!
Wright’s writing credits include episodes of Lost and Six Feet Under. He creates lifelike characters you’d be uncomfortable watching if you weren’t so drawn in to each moment they make.
The set consists of a bed. The four actors—Alex Lathrop, Briana Ratterman, Todd Robinson and Brooke Totman—do not leave the stage for any significant length of time throughout the 85-minute show. This means each is witness to the others’ actions, including intimate moments of vulnerability and sex, fights between spouses and the unbearable awkwardness spent with your spouse’s lover on the sidelines of a kids soccer game. When the actors do look at their “offstage” castmates, who sit in a makeshift waiting room, their gazes are pointed. Actors staying onstage is in the script, but acknowledging each other was a choice.
Emotional beats are never overdramatized. Often actors are desperate to put on a show of big feelings, but the four performers don’t fall into that vanity trap. Totman delicately plays Beth as someone who desperately wants to be a good person while making choices she herself finds objectionable, and the contained fury of Ratterman’s Cathy masks heartbreak until she can’t hold back the dam anymore.
The humor and quietness in Lathrop’s conflicted David makes it impossible to choose sides in the messy dissolution of two marriages. Robinson has the difficult job of playing someone objectively unlikable—he calls his wife names and openly talks about which of the other soccer moms he’d like to sleep with, but Robinson imbues Brad with understated pain.
All four actors’ performances offer the chance to see a fully formed person in each character, in whatever measure they’re a lover, traitor or betrayed.
Abrupt light changes mark shifts between scenes and monologues, never letting the audience get comfortable with any one permutation between the four characters. The blocking includes many types of contact, all of which look as authentic as if we were accidentally stumbling in on two people having a private moment. The actors are feet away, yet members of the audience at a recent performance literally leaned in during the first scene.
At first, this voyeurism felt salacious. Here we were as a group watching a sexy nude encounter! But by the second “love scene,” the audience was so still it felt as if no one but the actors breathed. Intimacy coordinator Carrie Puterbaugh’s work paid off.
While classical theater falls into two clean-cut categories—tragedy or comedy, death or marriage—Orange Flower Water is far truer to life. Instead of running from hard topics, Wright wrote space for the 100 Lives Repertory actors to work through them. There is no happy ending or great bloodbath, but the nuanced performances and production are expertly handled, so the ending felt earned, however imperfect its resolution.
SEE IT: Orange Flower Water at the Spotlight Theatre, 1123 SE Market St., 100livesrep.org/ofw. 7:30 pm Thursday–Saturday, Oct. 2–4 and 9–11; 5 pm Sunday, Oct. 5 and 12. $33.85, Oct. 2 performance $23.18.
