Theatre Exile's "Iron' at the Fringe (1st review)

Theatre Exile opened its new South Philadelphia space, Studio X, with Iron, by the Scottish writer Rona Munro. Under the crafty direction of Deborah Block (last heard from with Hunter Gatherers), the Exile ensemble picks up where it left off with last season's final show, Conor McPherson's Shining City: fragile, damaged characters chasing ghosts, struggling to communicate, and seeking redemption.

Instead of Shining City's focus on two male characters in meager Dublin apartment spaces, Iron is set in a women's prison and focuses on the relationship between a mother and daughter estranged through the mother's murder of the father years before.

Studio X is a converted garage that provides breadth but little depth in its rowhouse neighborhood. Director Block's solution to the limited space is to frame the proceedings on a catwalk stage with two-deep audience seating on both sides of the stage. On each end of the catwalk, two small pedestal stages provide space to isolate individual character depictions as well as to symbolize the physical and psychological space that mother and daughter must traverse.

It's an effective spatial strategy that injects needed movement in a somewhat static and dialogue-heavy play while simultaneously allowing the audience to examine the proceedings with the equivalent of the cinematic close-up shot.

The stunning proximity allows the audience to peer voyeuristically into the psychological dissection that occurs onstage. This examination is both familiar and new. The prison house narrative— in which the chains of submerged and repressed family relationships, metaphorically signified by the prison walls, are slowly exposed and unraveled within a slight tension of suspense— is a well known narrative of masculine identity. Munro asks us to look at the narrative anew as an expression of feminine identity.

The two principal characters, the mother Fay played by Catharine K. Slusar and the daughter Josie played by Kim Carson, expertly negotiate this well trod yet alienated communicative landscape. At first their conversation seems indistinguishable from a Hollywood prison movie. But then, through inventive hesitations in speaking and some off rhythm glances, they begin to develop an independent feminized narrative.

The whole production is an exercise in naked courage. There is simply no place to hide in Studio X, and the only protection offered by the script is words. So the actors are left utterly alone onstage to stand and deliver— not comic standup, but the ruins of human endeavor.♦


To read another review by Pamela Riley, click here.