BWW Reviews: TWTP's U.S. professional premiere of UNRAVELLING THE RIBBON

Sitting on a shelf in my living room is a small silver frame holding a picture of my friend Kit Andrews and me, looking very happy, very blond and impossibly young (we were in our 20s at the time the photo was taken), at a charity event in a Nashville hotel ballroom. A lot has happened since then - good/bad, happy/sad. Kit was, without doubt, one of the kindest, funniest, most absolutely off-the-wall people you could ever meet and one of the best friends ever.

Unfortunately, Kit's life was cut far too short by breast cancer, although with her trademark humor and enormous heart, she knew how to say goodbye with style and grace: she threw a big party for all her friends and told us all how much we meant to her. I've been thinking a lot about Kit in the past couple of weeks since word came that Tennessee Women's Theater Project would be producing the United States professional premiere of Mary Kelly and Maureen White's Unravelling the Ribbon - a serio-comic look at the impact that a diagnosis of breast cancer has on the lives of three women in contemporary Ireland. With trepidation, I approached Unravelling the Ribbon warily, but I'm delighted to report that my friend Kit would have loved it as much as I do.

Director Maryanna Clarke's intelligent choice to retain the play's original setting instead of transplanting the playwrights' characters to some American hamlet helps to underscore the play's universality and to further illustrate how women all over the world must confront the cold reality of a cancer diagnosis. With the tremendous guidance of dialect coach Jill Massie, the three actresses in the piece (Corrie Miller, Kristin James and Linda Sue Simmons) display a remarkable gift of actually sounding as if they come from the Emerald Isle, instead of sounding like a bunch of Tennessee actresses mimicking the Lucky Charms leprechaun. Clearly, Miller and Simmons fare the best with their affected accents, while James, cast as the pre-teen daughter of Miller's character, tends to sound more middle-class American (which could be easily explained by the omnipresence of American music and culture the world over).

While Clarke and her talented cast unravel the story of Rose, Lyndsey and Lola, we are given a glimpse into the women's lives; in the process, learning as much about ourselves as we learn about the women in the play. It's a moving, oftentimes awe-inspiring journey - teeming with an intensity of feeling that might be off-putting if performed by lesser talents under the guidance of a director who doesn't care as much as Clarke so obviously does.

The play's three acts are divided into "Diagnosis," "Treatment" and "After," which gives the audience member a fairly clear template of what's to come in the course of the just over 90 minutes of storytelling. And while you will be moved to tears, perhaps at the most unexpected moments in the sweetly nuanced script, you will also laugh out loud and be enormously moved by the scenes enacted onstage. It's not maudlin, it's not overly sentimental - instead it is, quite frankly, a lot like life itself - and the story unfolds naturally and evocatively.

Clarke's sensitive direction is felt throughout Unravelling the Ribbon, as certainly as the richly delineated characters are so memorably drawn by Kelly and White in their sharply written script.

The luminously gifTed Miller plays Rose, the 30-something hairdresser and mother of two, who finds a lump in her breast in the play's early moments. Rose's circuitous journey through diagnosis, treatment and recovery is dealt with rather matter-of-factly, yet somehow her trek seems all the more powerful as a result. Perhaps it is Miller's heartfelt rendering of her character that makes it more compelling for the audience member recalling his fallen friend, or perhaps it is the no-nonsense manner in which the playwrights tell Rose's story - whatever it is, it is movingly, heart-wrenchingly genuine and only the coldest, most unfeeling person in that darkened theatre won't feel a lump in his throat or be forced to stifle a near-sob.

Simmons plays Lola, the aging Dublin hippie, whose chance encounter with Rose and her daughter Lyndsey (played with the right amount of pre-teen confoundedness by the adult actress James) changes the lives of all three women and whose unfettered joy and love of life proves she is anything but the contrarian we first suspect her to be. Simmons plays Lola with a ripe earthiness that is made all the more sublime by her multi-dimensional reading of the role, her beautifully expressive face showing so remarkably the affects of Lola's own bout with cancer and the subsequent double radical mastectomy that inflicted such pain upon her marriage.

Miller and Simmons are superb as Rose and Lola and while it may be difficult to tell where Corrie ends and Rose begins or where Linda Sue leaves off and Lola picks up, rest assured that you are in for an acting master class when these two women take the stage. And it is obvious that James' own performance of Lyndsey flowers in her scenes with the two more experienced actresses - together, the three women make Unravelling the Ribbon a powerfully rendered and emotionally felt exemplar of the transformative power of live theatre.

Clarke's expert direction of the piece is given the requisite underpinnings provided by Katie Gant's lighting design, Susan Jakoblew's costume design and Chris Clarke's sound design.

- Unravelling the Ribbon. By Mary Kelly and Maureen White. Directed by Maryanna Clarke. Presented by Tennessee Women's Theater Project at the Z. Alexander Looby Theatre, Nashville. Through October 17. For details, call (615) 681-7220 or visit the company website at www.twtp.org.

Pictured (left to right): Corrie Miller, Linda Sue Simmons and Kristin James