The Thursday Night Bridge Circle

Jericho Arts Centre until October 2, 2022
Tickets from $26 at 604-224-8007 or  www.unitedplayers.com

Posted September 13, 2022

There’s something je ne sais quoi about certain actors that, regardless of the size of the role they play, you can’t take your eyes off them. Kathryn Shaw is one of those. And in this United Players production of The Thursday Night Bridge Circle, with a cast of eleven women, to stand out, as Shaw does, is really saying something. As the increasingly inebriated, elderly Miss Virginia, Shaw is in character every minute – even if she is just sitting on, or falling off, a settee stage left or right. The retired Artistic Director of Studio 58, Shaw has taken up acting again and is working on a solo show.

This is not to disparage the rest of this excellent ensemble team. Under the direction of Sarah Rodgers, newly appointed Artistic Director of United Players, this is a tight team of highly experienced as well as not-so-experienced actors – all women – and playwright Ray Kennedy has written a colourful vehicle for each of them. Each character is carefully crafted and comes with unique qualities. They all – with two or three exceptions – come from an entitled past: affluent and white. In the 1970s in small town North Carolina that was a passport to the good life. Perhaps it still is.

In Kennedy’s play, it is early Thursday evening and Louise (Evangela Kepinski) is flitting about in her flowing caftan in her living room, plumping up cushions, shifting small tabletop posies around and anxiously thinking about the food she has asked Margaret, her black American maid (Allyson Riley) to prepare for her soon-to-arrive bridge club – many of whom are relatives, including her mother Mrs. Coltrane (Sheryl Anne McMillan), her mother-in-law Mrs. Kennedy (Erin Matchette), her college-age daughter Mary Carter Kennedy (Ava Stark) and her lawyer sister-in-law Carmella (Caitlin Clugston). Also in the bridge group are Cluster (Rebecca DeBoer), Bootsie (Kyla Ferrier) and Miss Caroline (Rhona McCallum Lichtenwald).

“Mah nerves are shot”, Louise tells us although you can bet it’s Margaret who has cleaned the house from  front door to back, done all the cooking and will do all the cleanup. Kepinski, as Louise, carries the play alone for about the first twenty minutes and she manages to entertain us quite nicely with her character’s southern charm. But charming as Louise is, her sense of entitlement is increasingly hard to stomach.

That eventually is where the playwright is going. It takes a little too long before the bombshell explodes but when it does – when the word “nigra” is used – The Thursday Night Bridge Circle starts to get much more interesting. Margaret tells it like it is and Allyson Riley – as Margaret – runs with it with style, sincerity and grace. “Nigra”, Margaret explains to the somewhat astonished women, means, “harm, a lot of harm.”

Does the fact that these women have grown up in a culture that takes for granted the supremacy of white over black Americans excuse them? Or should common decency prevail despite the generations of entrenched racial inequality? Despite Margaret’s lifelong commitment to Louise’s family, how much does Louise know about her? What about Margaret’s own child Neecie (Sarah Reech)? How often did Margaret put the well-being of Louise’s children before her own? Has Louise ever even noticed?

While the play may not seem relevant to a Vancouver audience, there certainly are parallels with our First Nations people who still have a long way to go to reach equality.

There is a surprising revelation late in the play that perhaps is meant by the playwright to absolve one of the characters but does it? While those in need of charity generally express gratitude, who really wants to be on the receiving end of charity? At best, it is a starting point on the path to fairness.

Set design by Brian Ball is handsome with a single well-appointed living room circa 1970. And costumes by Sheila White are appropriate to the place and period.

The Thursday Night Bridge Circle spends a little too long on what one reviewer has called “Southern-fried witticisms”. But well-worth considering is Mrs. Coltrane’s declaration – and at the very heart of Kennedy’s play – “We are all prisoners of gender and, yes, our race.” High time for a prison break.