Three generations of women turn up 'Heat': Personalities and emotions come to a simmer

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(Free-Press-Release.com) December 5, 2006 -- Take a blisteringly hot summer weekend in a small town. Stir in four women spanning three generations, all gathered in a house with a classic porch, a worn-out air conditioner, and a grandmother who shows signs of the onset of dementia. And then sprinkle with a whole lot of unresolved emotional business.

The still-feisty and seemingly prim grandmother, Mudear (Carol Rayner Brazier), is in a potentially perilous state. But she also has two middle-age daughters to contend with -- Rose Williams (deborah neal) and Sharon Williams (Gay Glenn) -- sisters with possibly different fathers, and clearly different personalities and ways of life, all of which makes for some palpable tension and resentment in their relationship. On top of all this there is Sharon's twentysomething, law school-bound daughter, Shelly (Rhonda Marie Bynum), who has just recovered from a major health scare and must now face the fact that she will be unable to have children.

The two sisters, who came of age in the 1960s, are an interesting study in contrasts. Rose was always the wild one -- the hot pants girl with lots of boyfriends but ultimately no marriage and no real career track. She has recently come home, rather unhappily, to live with and care for her mother, and to deal with the mid-life crisis (she is turning 50) that finds her in something of a state of denial. Still looking for men and sex, she is not averse to puffing on a joint from time to time.

Sharon, a teacher who is building a new home, is far more uptight, proper and successful. But divorced from the handsome, manly man she still clearly loves (and with whom Rose might once have had a dalliance), she is bitter and lonely. And her relationship with her daughter is not what it should be. Not surprisingly, the daughter bonds easily with Rose, her free-spirited aunt. (In one belief-stretching scene, Sharon calls her daughter on the carpet and demands "R-E-S-P-E-C-T" in a way that would seem more fitting were she a teenager.

Estell, a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists (where this play debuted in 2004) and author of the 2003 Black Ensemble show "Mama Said There'll Be Days Like This: The History of the Girl Groups," certainly possesses a well-tuned ear for mother-daughter and sibling banter. She also has a nice feel for the fallout of the Black Power era, for the little hypocrisies and self-realizations about hair and skin color preferences in black culture, for a sense of who does the dreary tasks in any family, and for the generational use of the "c" word (as in "colored").

But the play tends to get bogged down in too many heavy-handed revelations from the past, and a senility episode comes off as more than a little melodramatic. While well-played, the scene about a hands-on push for Sharon to vent her anger over her fate also seems excessive.

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POSTED BY HEDY WEISS

air conditioner     carol rayner brazier     different personalities     hot summer weekend     rose williams