Out of the Mouths of Babes

THERE COULDN'T BE a better time of year to see this show. Winter is clearly an idea whose time has passed, but spring is still just an empty dream that evaporates when a 40 degree day is succeeded by an ice storm. And for those confined to house arrest in Cambridge, this is the time that sends one fleeing--to escape in some nostalgic remembrance of high school or the promise of some real world release, somewhere down the road.

Cornelia Ravenal's Out of the Reach of Children attempts to draw us back to those last wonderful days when we were lords of creation, when we were high school seniors, and then, more ambitiously, tries to prepare us for the big bad world of shattered high school dreams. Its occasionally inspired script, the generally excellent performances and the cast's awesome energy level paper over the flaws that occasionally obscure Ravenal's views of times past and future.

Ravenal does not try to paint subtle portraits of five women's lives. Rather she follows the same pattern she set in last year's Riches (from which she has drawn several songs for Children) of presenting stereotypes, who work their way through what is essentially a musical revue of women's experiences, rather than rounded characters. And the strength of the production lies in the cast's ability to infuse these ideal types with life as they march through vignette after vignette. The show stumbles most, though never managing to fall, when songs demand fully developed characters to lend credibility to the very personal experiences the lyrics describe.

During the first act, the strongest part of the show, the five actresses are seventeen-year-old high school seniors who have just been voted most popular, most likely to succeed, best dressed, class clown and class cutie. Ravenal's revue-style production successfully recreates the feelings of sex hungry, adolescent, neurotic, sweetly vicious teenagers. And the exceptional cast manages to hook up the disconnected images of each high school experience and present a picture of what the good old days at least ought to have been like.

THE MAJOR THEME comes out early. Sex. Or love if you like. Patti (Patty Woo), facing the classic problem of all hopeless romantics in "Used To," the third song of the evening, gives up her search for an Aryan demigod when swept away by a sweet schlep. Though we never found out just how long it was before her affair crashed, Woo's lovelorn overachiever presages the cast's comprehensive review of their dealings with boys from a casual come hither to determined attempts to do without.

The one who most successfully does without, and whose performance is consistently the most moving, is Julie Woods as Synthia. Voted most popular, Synthia is a cool, blunt observer; she's the one you used to turn to when closer friends became close and you needed some perspective on the emotional carnage. She, more than anyone else in the show, makes her stereotype a person. With an extraordinarily strong voice and a very smooth, sarcastic style, Woods escapes the limits of the revue form and forces us to share the events of her days from her unhappy first brush with sex (described in the song "Getting Home") to her careful analysis of her friends (the other four women in the show) which she reads to us in her solo "Journal."

The other three actresses, Ravenal, Maggie-Meg Reed and Caroline Rody, all act competently, though without the near complete control over their characters that Woods manages. Ravenal, as Erica, the neurotic, college-boy-chasing, self-appointed court jester neatly portrays some of the ambiguities facing the nubile but nervous seventeen-year-old. But she skirts triteness when she sings a eulogy for her dead grandmother in one of the two "heavy" songs of the act. Reed, as Marion the sex-starved, and Rody, as Laura the oh-so-cute, faithfully depict their personality types' stereotypical reactions to predictable situations. However, they never get much beyond fairly rote descriptions of what people of their ilk ought to look like. Reed's smiles and breezy invitations, the tedious explanations she makes to her friends the morning after amuse, but don't linger. Rody, whose voice weakens throughout the evening and who is burdened with fairly boring lines to start with, is not helped by her bland soulfulness.

WHILE THE ACTING ranged from the excellent to the merely competent, the orchestra was uniformly professional, playing Ravenal's score with remarkable precision. The music caught the moods and feelings of the players throughout the first act. Composed by Ravenal and arranged by her with Pat Powers and Michael Schubert, it flowed from standard pop to jazz to a wonderful Carpenters imitation in the song "Mister Ivy," a song of passionate yearning in which Patti's quest comrades. (Ravenal also demonstrates her knack for a turn of phrase when Patti describes the most meaningful experience in her life--teaching an orphan to swim while getting 780/810 board scores.)

Throughout the first act, tight writing and capable acting hide the problems that became increasingly annoying as the show winds its way to its final burst of nervous optimism. Blocking problems, which seem minor at first, keep recurring. Too often what passes for choreography becomes simply two pairs facing each other as the featured character prances in between. Every now and then, all five actresses line up at the edge of the stage, choir-style, and start singing. They're singing quite nicely, to be sure, but the show loses its dramatic force when the players only produce the theatrical equivalent of declaiming from a podium.

But more seriously, the second act, when the women reappear as 23-year-olds, suffers as Ravenal tries to force more deep meanings than the revue format can sustain. Throughout the first act each character never has to be an individual. But in the second act, each woman suffers a major, almost debilitating collapse of some kind or other which is necessary to complete Ravenal's revue of women's experience. The life crisis that all the actresses suffer, however, could only be believable if complicated people were suffering them. And surely one woman out of five might have emerged from four years of college without suffering drastic emotional mutilation.

This is not to say that the songs, and the experiences themselves, are not quite moving. Again Woods, now suffering vicious midnight flashbacks, completely silences the audience as she tells of her abortion. In "John," Ravenal, too, is convincing as the confidante who can never quite become the lover.

But for the most part the deep confessions--Reed's admission that swinging might not be all that it's cracked up to be, Rody's bizarre comments on her inability to make commitments--all ring false. When each character comes before us and claims that she has been totalled in some very personal way we come up against the bottom line that the people in this show are not people but classes of people. Their crises are simply too individual (devastatingly so) to work, and when sung, they sound like trite attempts to seem meaningful.

At the show's end, this musical tries to end happily. From some hidden reserve of strength each actress, albeit somewhat tentatively, decides that she has the power to start from scratch one more time. And if the shift from mental shambles to self-conscious self-respect is a little abrupt, the energy of the company makes up for the inconsistency. Simply: the actresses and musicians in Children are very, very good and they overcome to a large degree the mediocre aspects of the production. Though the show has its share of problems, it still stands out as one of the best around right now and one of the best original shows at Harvard for quite some time.