By Doug Shanaberger

For the Observer-Reporter

Men, especially husbands and fathers, never get much of a break in modern women's fiction, do they?

Most male characters in popular bleeding-heart novels, plays and screenplays aimed at the female audience were, until a few years ago, loathsome creatures deserving punishment for both the traits they have and the sins they've committed.

Then the rules changed. After writers specializing in the business of tortured plotting discovered that ridicule makes an adequate substitute for condemnation, men were abruptly downgraded from violent and abusive to cloddish and superfluous.

Consider "Mother Teresa Is Dead," now at Pittsburgh's City Theatre. Helen Edmundson's monotonous drama presents itself as the story of a woman who left her husband and son in England and fled to a village in India, but if cynicism begins to gnaw on your patience, you'll see that it's really about the man who, in soap opera parlance, "drove her to it."

And by "it," I mean quite a lot, according to the artist who rescued Jane (Rebecca Harris) and became her caretaker, friend and protector.

When Frances (Kristin Griffith) found her, Jane was a weeping mass of confusion, wanted to help someone as desperately as she herself needed help, insisted that the suitcase in her hand contained the remains of a dead infant, and had lice. Forced to digest so much lumpy melodrama, I remembered Thelma Ritter's comeback in "All About Eve": "What a story ... everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end."

Whatever Jane did, it's obvious that Edmundson decided to heap all the blame onto the husband, Mark (Sam Redford), who arrives in India wanting to take Jane home yet dumbfounded by his wife's behavior. We don't need to ask what Edmundson thinks of Mark when his insensitivity, crudeness, bigotry and ill-timed discussions about sex tritely lay out the details, and in addition to being an emotional weakling, the guy is a klutz, too. He can't ride a bicycle.

I guess we're supposed to look at the events on stage and think "Run, Jane, run ... hide from the bad man!," and perhaps we'd have more compassion if the play - under Tracy Brigden's direction - weren't a smorgasbord of half-baked women's issues and if Harris could salvage Edmundson's lead role with the talent she employed in "A Picasso" at City Theatre and "The Exonerated" at the Pittsburgh Playhouse.

Right now, Harris' whimpering voice and boo-hoo expressions invite more derision than sympathy since Jane's anxiety about her life and her desire to help the underprivileged are just hackneyed devices in the playwright's manipulation. They exist to emphasize the point that her marriage to Mark made Jane into the hopeless wreck we see before us.

Griffith nearly rescues "Mother Teresa Is Dead" with the intensity in her performance, and she skillfully uses bottled-up resentment in a scene that allows Frances to berate the Indian do-gooder (Nehal Joshi) whose contempt for Mark and interest in Jane reveal his own selfishness.

Even to such moments boiling over with hostility, Edmundson brings nothing original, though, and I was surprised after attending last Sunday's matinee to hear that the play's first production, in London, received excellent notices. I'd like to give the author a traffic ticket for permitting so many clichés to pile up at one intersection.

Can't City Theatre do better than this?

Home