The Sorrows That Bind


It’s not that the two women in Tom Ziegler’s "Grace and Glorie" hold different values — one sings along with The Good News Quartet on the radio; the other despises God for the senseless cruelties he visits on human beings.

It’s that they come from different planets.

Grace has lived all her life on a farm in rural Virginia. She’s never been more than 50 miles from the bed she is dying in.

Gloria — stubbornly misnamed "Glorie" by Grace — is an urban-born Yankee with an MBA from Harvard who volunteers, since leaving New York and moving South, for hospice.

Small wonder the two circle like old and dangerous enemies.

But Gloria is determined, for her own terrible reasons, and despite Grace’s objections, to help the 90-year-old widow die in peace and comfort.

"You volunteer to help people die?" Grace asks, stunned by the absurdity of it.

"Volunteering," Gloria replies, "is what all the well-off women around here do with their time."

So Gloria crashes around the cottage, alarmed by the wood stove, the water pump, the chickens on the porch, the earth-moving equipment tearing up the landscape around them and the fact that her charge refuses to take the morphine prescribed her.

Grace is vexed by all this annoying incompetence. "I always regretted not having a daughter," she says genially. "Now I’m feeling blessed."

And so it goes, with Gloria offering Grace brie — "Just smell it, Grace. Isn’t that heaven?" "I hope not," Grace responds — when the old lady clearly prefers Velveeta.

But Ziegler is doing more than charting the enmity between these two, because what he reveals to us, finally, are the sorrows that bind them and, in the end, empower them both to do good.

This is a moving, but not a perfect, play. The squabbling between the two seems a trifle formulaic after a while. Carl Ritchie’s direction lags, too. And whoever thought of putting Gloria in a tangerine suit barely long enough to cover her butt was terribly misguided. This woman does not lose all her style and sense the minute she goes shopping for clothes.

But whatever frailties we encounter in the production are overcome by Chase Crosley, playing Grace, and Diedre Bollinger, Gloria.

If the two did not always know their lines on opening night, they understood their parts absolutely.

And in the end, each convinces us that her own terrible sorrows and particular talents help her heal the other as no one else in the whole world could.

 

 

The Copake Theatre Company’s "Grace and Glorie" plays weekends at the Grange in Copake, NY, through May 13. For reservations, call 518-325-1234.

 

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