"Coupla White Chicks' by New City Stage (2nd review)

Before I started reviewing plays, I was the world's worst theater Nazi. One night at the opera, a man in my box unwrapped one piece of candy after the next, even after being shushed by others. He stopped when I leaned forward and loudly snapped my fingers in his ear. Another evening, the couple seated in front of me kept whispering, until I stuck my program between their heads and held it there. Then there was the time I kicked a man out of his folding chair and onto the floor because he kept humming along to the songs in Chess.

Since then, like a good professional, I've tempered my outbursts. But this past Sunday, during the opening minutes of New City Stage's A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking, a man in front of me had left on the radio function of his cell phone, and the device was loudly broadcasting a sports event through the first ten minutes of the show.

The house manager came in and asked him to turn it off. Nothing. A couple in front of him turned around and stared. Finally, the show's producer had to escort him out of the theater (he loudly returned a few minutes later). I kept my mouth shut, and would have just dismissed the episode, until I learned that the offending oaf also attended in a professional capacity—as a Barrymore Award voter.

The actresses on stage noticed the disruption— Madi Distefano actually broke the fourth wall to peer out in search of the noise's source— and it took a few more scenes before she and Amanda Schoonover could reestablish their rhythm.

The critic's dilemma

In these wasted minutes, who knows what became of the show they had rehearsed for weeks in advance? And how much should a critic excuse from the performance because of this disruption? Did the show lose the sense of the women as stereotypes—Distefano's obnoxious Texas transplant to Schoonover's prim Westchester housewife— and thus fail to find the comedy in their exaggerated antics?

When Schoonover had to carry an entire scene, if not the entire arc of the play in one moment of forgiveness, and failed, could I still blame that on the curveball thrown at her in the play's opening minutes?

For her part, Distefano still terrified when she threatened, and though she starts suitably despicable, she manages to generate real sympathy by the play's end. And J. Alex Cordaro's well-choreographed fight scene evoked peals of laughter. Both actresses managed to convey the shifting psychological timbre sought by director Brenna Geffers, and I can't discredit thrown timing— something even seasoned comics lose when heckled— that might have accounted for the lapses of humor.

For love of catfights

Perhaps because of the disruption, the first two-thirds of John Ford Noonan's 1979 play felt like a dated example of a man writing about women, showing how every man loves to watch a catfight but doesn't want to see the drama that leads up to it. But for all its datedness, the plot of two women trying to salvage lives for themselves out of marriages wrecked by abusive and philandering husbands offered a very forward-looking insight into the shortcomings of sisterhood.

Is it churlish of me to expect Schoonover and Distefano to recover sufficiently from one night's rough start to make me feel the depth of their characters' over-arching struggle by the play's end? Shakespeare's players faced constant heckling; Molière's audiences felt free to gossip or doze off; and the performers in Verdi's operas sang through boos and hisses.

But that was then. Sunday's disruption stole from me and everyone else the chance to see two of Philadelphia's most recognized actresses transport me into their world. Who knows what wonders we might have missed as a result?♦


To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.