Edith Bouvier Beale (aka Big Edie) sits in her comfortable chair, swaddled in a housecoat, her stream-of-consciousness commentary ricochets from her short-lived singing career to the menagerie of cats to anything else of little consequence. Then, like a bolt from the blue, she aims a savage comment at her daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale (Little Edie). Based on the film by the same name, the musical Grey Gardens examines the dissolution of American royalty, recrimination and regret as played out in a symbiotic-yet-dysfunctional family dynamic.
After filming documentaries on the Monterey Pop Music Festival and The Rolling Stones, Albert and David Maysles released Grey Gardens (1975), a documentary on the mother and daughter who were living in a shambolic, 14-room mansion in East Hampton, N.Y. When tabloids picked up on code violations and eviction proceedings, the Bouvier’s cousins/aunts Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Caroline Lee Radziwill temporarily bailed them out financially.
Windfall Theatre’s production of the 2006 musical by Doug Wright, Scott Frankel and Michael Korie splits the chronology into two acts: 1941, when Little Edie recalls her engagement party to Joseph Kennedy Jr., an event sabotaged by her own mother (in fact, all her potential suitors are run off in similar fashion); and 1973, which involves mother and daughter’s tortured pas de deux, blaming each other for lives squandered.
Michelle Waide as Big Edie and Amanda Hull as Little Edie portray the duo as scathing and resignedly supportive. Songs move the story along at a good clip; Donna Kummer’s piano accompaniment is wonderful. At times, the principals singing over each other intensifies the underlying tension. Humor and sadness exist side by side in the Maysles-inspired second act, which finds Big Edie benignly begoggled behind her thick glasses and her daughter shabbily fashioned in her safety-pinned creations. Mom’s husband long ago got a Mexican divorce, and her boogie-woogie piano playing gigolo (Adam Qutaishat as her “soul mate,” a boozy but pragmatic George Gould Strong) is but a recurring memory. Her daughter’s aspirations of stardom in the Big Apple and her (imagined?) dreams of happiness with Kennedy vanished long before he died in World War II.
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The future Jackie O (Robin Lewis) and Princess Lee (Hayley San Fillippo) show up as precocious teenagers. Tom Marks works double duty as patriarch J.V. Major Bouvier Jr. and a spirited Norman Vincent Peale leading the company in “Choose To Be Happy.” Does social standing qualify the Bouvier’s behavior as eccentric when mental illness might be more accurate in explaining the blurred lines between reality and denial? Edie’s claim the she is not her mother’s daughter but her shadow, rings true. When mother requests a snack of pate, her daughter obliges with a tin that just might be cat food. That thin line again.
Grey Gardens presents a family dynamic as rich and tragic as Tennessee Williams: Those on the outside are clamoring to get in, and those on the inside are dying to leave.
Through Feb. 23 at Village Church Arts, 130 E. Juneau Ave. For tickets, call 414-332-3963 or visit www.windfalltheatre.com.
