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Date Posted: 09:01:31 04/16/05 Sat GMT
Author: Lynn
Subject: Blood ties are at heart of emotional drama: The Crimson Thread (Denver Post)

The Denver Post
theater

Blood ties are at heart of emotional drama
By John Moore
Denver Post Theater Critic

Friday, April 15, 2005 -

The primary color in Mary Haynes' Irish saga "The Crimson Thread" is not shamrock green but blood red.

Red signifies not only the blood that courses through veins and connects generations, but also the blood so often spilled in any family's pursuit of a better life.

In staging this relentlessly heartfelt family epic, acclaimed Arvada Center director Jane Page and scenic designer Joseph J. Egan have strewn not thread across their stage but three huge, interweaving ropes. They start by dangling separately high atop one side, then intertwine and drop to the floor like a root. They then journey across the stage before soaring high into the rafters on the other side.

It is a rather overt symbol of the surviving interconnectedness of three generations of Irish sisters across both years (1869-1911) and the Atlantic. And when you learn at what cost, you understand why these ropes must be red.

This bold conceit might even be more effective were the ropes as thick as trunks on one side but withered to frayed threads on the other, signifying how family bonds may become strained by time, distance, loss and progress, but remain, however precariously, intact.

That might more accurately reflect the progression of the six stoic women who populate "The Crimson Thread," which presents sisters in pairs in three separate playlets, each set two decades apart. Their story is not only that of one family that fled Ireland after the potato famine. It is the story of every family of any ethnicity that has migrated here.

In the opener, set in Dun Laoghaire, Eilis (Anne Penner) has been summoned by her husband to their new home in Massachusetts, which means saying goodbye forever to beloved sister Bridget (Diana Dresser). In the next, Eilis' daughter Fionnuala (Karen LaMoureaux) consoles sister Kathleen (Elgin Kelley) after her husband's death in a boating accident. In the finale, Nora (Jessica Austgen) comes to New York City to inform wayward elder sister Maggie (Josephine Hall) of their mother Fionnuala's impending death.

Page is the first woman to direct "The Crimson Thread" at any professional theater, and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival veteran is at the top of her game here, from impeccable casting to plentiful touches that further this thread of threads. The set, for example, is split into three locales on a single turntable, so the characters who make up this family's past and present hover over the current activity like a horizon or a memory.

Page smartly adopts not genuine period Irish accents but representational dialects that fade as scenes, and years, pass. Some may quibble with the lack of authenticity but as a homogenized Irishman, I far more appreciate actually being able to understand the words.

The first two scenes are strongly executed, unapologetic tearjerkers. Haynes first set out to write what became episode 2, based on a painting of a woman on a rooftop oblivious to the cold night air. So it's no surprise this wrenching scene is her best piece of writing.

Like Penner and Dresser, the sisterly bond between LaMoureaux and Kelley is evident enough for them to pass at each other's family reunions. But as a new widow who previously lost her only child and two brothers, Kelley is simply astonishing.

From her draining work in "Manson Family Values" to "Metamorphoses," the ferocious Kelley is establishing herself as perhaps Denver's most capable actor at taking us into utter emotional exile, to remote places in the heart we would never want to visit alone. Here she's sinking into a despair as deep as the ocean.

The piece's emotional truth is strained by the sentimental manipulation of the tacked-on final scene, through no fault of the actors. Maggie is a union organizer mourning her 146 "new sisters" - workers who perished in New York City's infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire, one of the worst industrial accidents in U.S. history. Naive sister Nora is Haynes' most slightly drawn character, and as a result much of the evening's potency dissipates.

But this scene does offer a nice bit of closure, as Maggie harks back to the opening scene, where 42 years earlier her great-aunt Bridget exhibited the same kind of rabble- rousing spirit. Bridget was the mother of six who stayed behind, keeping the family line alive in the motherland. But she sang rebel songs to her babes, clamored for the as-yet unrealized rights of Irishmen to own their own land and exclaimed, "I am more afraid of poverty than the pope."

The red rope of family may now be a mere crimson thread, but it clearly remains intact.

Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.

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