Enfield
The Music Man it ain’t. Nor Our Town. Nor even Romeo and Juliet.
And yet: For many reasons, not least the fearless performances of Susan Haefner and Theresa Kloos, teenagers and parents and even the child-free among us should see and hear this two-woman drama — f-bombs and detailed references to the female reproductive system and all — by the writer of the riveting HBO series In Treatment and of the first season of Netflix’s House of Cards.
“Why didn’t you have an abortion?” Rachel, the younger of the two evolutionary biologists, asks the elder near the end of the play.
“I didn’t want to,” the 56-year-old Zelda replies.
“Are you religious?”
“No, I’m Darwinian.”
A weighty pause follows, one of many throughout the play that Haefner as Zelda and Kloos as 28-year-old Rachel navigate with exquisite timing and humor and empathy and restrained anger, while peeling back the many layers of denial and defense enveloping one secret after another over a production of 100 minutes that feels far shorter.
Shaker Bridge regulars will remember Haefner from her performances as Brooke in Other Desert Cities in 2015 and as Juliana in The Other Place the year before. Kloos, meanwhile, has performed locally in Gypsy and a number of productions at the New London Barn Playhouse in recent years, and in Northern Stage’s Into the Woods.
Their performances in The How and the Why are about as much as we can reveal about this play without spoiling for you the neuroses and revelations that the characters expose while circling each other, first in Zelda’s office at an unnamed research university in Cambridge, Mass., during the first act, and in a dive bar during the second.
With an equal-parts infuriating and endearing mix of arrogance and self-doubt, Kloos plays Rachel, an up-and-coming researcher seeking traction for and recognition of her potentially revolutionary theory of how and why modern women of child-bearing age menstruate and why their systems shut down at a certain point.
Meanwhile, Haefner’s Zelda, seeing much of her younger self in the aspiring scientist, struggles to maintain the cool objectivity that allowed her to build a career around her own theory of human development, which Rachel’s could undermine. That objectivity and that career also cost Zelda the “normal” life of marriage and motherhood, yet she’d mostly made peace with it until Rachel showed up with her own professional and personal lives teetering in the balance.
“It’s going to change everything,” Rachel says of her theory in the first act. “The way that women think about their bodies. The way that men think about women’s bodies. The way that people have sex.”
“It’s going to change the way people have sex,” Zelda echoes.
“Yes,” Rachel replies.
“Well,” Zelda continues. “Don’t make me beg. I’m past the age where I have any interest in intellectual supremacy. These days, I’m simply looking for the truth. You might have it.”
One more pregnant pause, between sharply written and courageously delivered lines of dialogue, helps this production fly by. And together, they make the story linger after the lights go up.
Shaker Bridge Theatre stages Sarah Treem’s