Aftershocks at the Colony Theatre: Review

AFTERSHOCKS at the Colony — Critic’s Choice Review by Rob Kendt, Back Stage West

While Doug Haverty’s new play Aftershocks ultimately comes down on the nurture-side of nature vs. Nurture debate, it’s the intrigue and uncertainty of the nature side that gives this uniquely cathartic play its most wrenching and haunting human drama. In this straightforward but carefully layered tale of an adopted woman who seeks out her birth mother, Haverty has created an indelible character of rich, unlikely pathos: Daphne Potanski (Sandra Kinder), a fiftyish Cleveland housewife who’s put an unpleasant marriage behind her — along with a certain premarital shame.

When that buried shame shows up as a pert, thirtyish woman named Beth (Rachel Sheppard) on the patio of the Sun Valley trailer Daphne shares with another marital refugee, Olive (the excellent Kathryn Kates), it opens old wounds in unexpected and difficult ways. Something of an immature wreck despite her polished appearance, Beth has the troubling habit of firing question like, "Why didn’t you keep me?" at her unprepared birth mother. Indeed, Daphne — whose walls of celebrity head shots give her trailer the look of a Greek diner and who takes her work as a movie extra all too seriously — seems continuously unprepared for life in general. But Kinder’s brittle, moving performance gets at a core of hard-won dignity under Daphne’s blowsy surface.

Minor quibbles: Haverty lobs on an implausible parental unit ex machina midway through to beef up the drama, and apart from a few beautifully modulated scenes, Sheppard gives a querulously actory performance as Beth. These aside, the production is another Colony gem top to bottom, from Robert Wilson’s realistic but somehow otherworldly trailer home set, to Debra Garcia Lockwood’s sympathetic lighting, to Ted C. Giammona’s socially observant costumes. Carol Newell’s direction is tight and brisk, though it tends, along with the text, toward tearjerking. No matter. The good cry afforded by Aftershocks — like the foundation of family identity, natural or fictive — is well worth it.

Copyright Back Stage West
Reprinted with Permission
Aftershocks at the Colony Theatre