“20TH CENTURY BLUES”: Life Imitating Art

 

Four friends meet in a jail cell in the 1970’s. One of them takes a photo of the others. The next year, the photographer reconvenes the four and takes another photo. And every year thereafter, for forty years.

Now the Museum of Modern Art has come calling, offering the photographer a retrospective of her professional work, and she wants to use the forty photos as her exhibit.

Thus begins the engagingly comic and heartfelt “20th Century Blues” by Susan Miller, opening Tuesday, January 23rd at the Red Barn Theatre in Key West for a four week run. Directed by artistic director Joy Hawkins, the play stars Annie Miners, Deborah Jacobson, Marjorie Paul-Shook, Peggy Montgomery, Kathy Russ, and Justin Ahearn. All curtains are at 8 pm.

“We’ve all seen these women in magnificent roles before, but you will see them growing into new facets of their talent here,” said Hawkins. “This play really speaks to women’s lives today, so as actors and director we’ve had to explore ourselves, because it’s really about us.”

Miller, a two-time Blackburn and Obie Award winner for her plays “My Left Breast” and “Confessions of a Female Disorder”, has created an elegiac play that is ultimately a comedy about aging, but touches on so much more. Because while the series of photos has been the glue that has held the women together for four decades, it is now also what may tear them apart.

Her four characters, Danny, the photographer, and Sil, Mac, and Gabby are each dealing with their own issues, so when Danny asks the others to sign releases to allow the photos to go public, each of the women finds herself conflicted about doing so.

The beauty of the play is in their relationships, for while we learn why each woman is wary of releasing the photos, we are also made privy to the complications in their lives – complications that many in the audience may share. The play allows us to learn about each woman, while coherently commenting on how the swift passage of time has caught them off guard and has both changed them and strangely enough, allowed them to ultimately remain the same.

In a seeming affirmation of the old phrase, “life often imitates art”, though we don’t see a complete four decades of photos in the production, Miller’s play would seem to owe an inspirational debt to a 2014 MOMA exhibit called “The Brown Sisters: Forty Years”, Nicholas Nixon’s cumulative portraits of his wife and her sisters. Nixon’s riveting images show the influence of time, but also its consolations, ultimately becoming a life-affirming artistic experience.

So too, is “20th Century Blues”.

Tickets are available now at redbarntheatre.com/tickets or by calling the box office at 305-296-9911. Tickets are $47 for Opening Night and include admittance to the Opening Night After-Party. All other performances are $42. There is a Reduced-Price Preview performance on Monday, January 22nd. Tickets for that are $25, opening seating. The play is sponsored in part by KONKLife, Design Group Key West, and the Monroe County TDC.

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