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On a stage covered in yards of canvas, a kitchen table and two chairs glow in a wash of buttery yellow light. A middle-aged housewife in a yellow flowered dress enters, and finds a strange man at her kitchen table. He has lost his memory. Instead of calling the police, she offers him lemonade.
So begins Lemonade, a marvelously evocative play by writer-director Eve Ensler. This mysterious and surprisingly funny script is one of the strongest that Cleveland Public Theatre has produced in a long while, and under the sharp direction of Mark A. Zimmerman, the Public Theatre gives it a fine production. Its elusive dream-like pull is enhanced by a subtle set and light design by Debbie Malcolm and a simple but sinister score by Christopher Pepe.
"Were you running for your life or away from it?" asks Alice, who is soon content to let Bernard share her bed as well as her lemon cookies. Alice (Beverly Young Wykoff) doesn't seem to care where Bernard has come from, which horrifies her adult daughter Jane (Michelle Tucker). Her mother's new domestic bliss brings an outpouring of confusing emotions from the anorexic Jane, who moves from envy to protection to rage. Her suspicions mount until she becomes convinced that Bernard is an escaped killer. Surprisingly, Alice doesn't seem to care. The tensions between them mount and twist into continually surprising places.
The three principals are excellent. Bill Beck is a revelation as Bernard, the amnesiac drop-in who may be a multiple murderer. His eyes glittering behind coke-bottle lenses, he is affable and sly, vulnerable and guarded and ultimately unknowable. As he thrashes about, belly exposed, in half-remembered nightmares, he looks like a sea turtle flipped over on his back -- he may move slow, but you keep waiting for the snap.
Beverly Young Wykoff looks like everybody's cookie-baking Mom, with an appealing vulnerability. In contrast, Michelle Tucker is an urgent and powerful Jane, all angles and challenges. As Wykoff blooms and softens, Tucker seems to become ever more taut, like a violin string being pulled too tight. Their mother-daughter dance is achingly real.
Ensler's facility with language, the way her words loop and echo in ever-deeper resonances, and her ambiguously sinister atmosphere recalls Harold Pinter. But her sensibility, daring and unsentimental and funny, is very female. She is a writer to watch.