High-strung ‘Pearls’

A comedy about a fated necklace and its journey through myriad relationships, threading together love, loss, desire and destiny, is playing at the People’s Light and Theatre Company.

Michele Lowe’s String of Pearls is a compelling story with striking production values and a versatile cast. Four actresses play 27 characters in a story that winds its way around the country, across the Atlantic and through the past 35 years in a 90-minute straight-through performance.

The stories are held together by a linking device — a string of pearls — that eventually brings the series full circle. The pearls pass from woman to woman. An occasional man might serve as conduit, holding the pearls briefly as purchaser or peddler. The pearls frequently serve as a medium of financial, emotional or erotic exchange, but it’s only the women who actually make them important to their lives.

The pearls enter the story as the symbolic confirmation of a love in which an erotic act known as a "string of pearls" plays a pivotal role. Obviously, this is a play for mature audiences.

The necklace eventually symbolizes another improbable and oddly touching love before, at the very end, finding an appropriate home with a young bride in a hopeful marriage.

In a piece such as this, one might cynically expect predictability, but Lowe is inventive with her structure. She offers interesting characters, striking scenarios, some surprises, humor and a touch of fantasy. Director Abigail Adams’ brisk pacing prevents tedium from setting in.

Lowe’s characters range in age from a temperamental 3-year-old to a 72-year old widow. Most are in their mid-30s to mid-50s. They are professionals and stay-at-home moms, widowed, divorced, married or single.

Their clan includes an about-to-be-married research scientist, a 300-pound lesbian gravedigger, a hotel housekeeper, a French Holocaust survivor and a cafeteria worker who lives in the Bronx.

In addition to the necklace, their experiences as wives, mothers, caregivers and simply women connect them. What also links them is dissatisfaction. Almost universally, they yearn for a more satisfying life than the one they’re living. The spirit of the play is distinctly "pro-women."

Adams’ four talented actresses, led by Alda Cortese, endow Lowe’s characters with shape, depth, texture and reality through detailed gesture, intonation, movement and expression.

We see Cortese as the 72-year-old widow who sets out to find the missing pearl necklace and as the 39-year-old suburbanite who first receives it.

It’s not easy to warm up to Kathryn Petersen’s characters, especially a controlling political consultant who beds her sister’s husband on a whim and the long-suffering Abby, who avenges herself with her mother’s funeral. She’s more approachable as Beth’s granddaughter Amy, the about-to-be-wed research scientist for whom the necklace is sought.

Mary Elizabeth Scallen earns the biggest laughs for her down-to-earth portrayals of "cultured white trash," Abby’s overbearing and opinionated mother and the gravedigger, who’s concocting a love potion. Melanye Finister brings emotional depth to each of her roles, and she’s also lots of fun as the chic Beverly.

Men do figure into many stories, sometimes as lovers, often as exes, almost always as tangents to the main emotional thrust. Truth to tell, they don’t come off very well in the women’s accounts. The guys are mostly absent either physically, emotionally or both. The one we do hear the most of — Albert, the only male portrayed onstage — is physically abusive.

I found the back-and-forth timeline annoying. I think the play works best when it focuses on each emotional moment and reflects on the dizzying complex human relationships. The production should let Lowe’s comic brio light the way toward the emotional discoveries at the end.

For this production, People’s Light has nicely reconfigured the Steinbright stage to a theater-in-the-round with the distribution of seats in equal quantity in each section. Using four entrances, the action is nicely played to all sections of the audience.

One major disappointment is Dennis Parichy’s unimaginative lighting for each vignette. Also, Charles Brastow only hints at how an effective sound design can enhance the shifts in mood and tempo.

String of Pearls
Through Aug. 15
The People’s Light and Theatre Company
39 Conestoga Road
Malvern, Pa.
Tickets: $25-$40
610-644-3500
www.peopleslight.org