such small hands (review)

The world premiere of Tina Howe's such small hands reflected the dramatist's continued meditation on the dynamics between mothers and children. Syracuse Stage commissioned such small hands for Tony award-winning actor Elizabeth Franz, who played the roles of two sisters in this one-person show directed by Robert Moss. Its title taken from an e.e. cummings poem, the play's first act revolves around a documentarian, Cassandra, who returns to her deceased mother's studio to begin recording her memories of her mother; while the second act addresses the memories of Cassandra's sister, Lucy, a house-painter. Both characters struggle with memories of which child their volatile mother favored the most and the impact of their mother's art on their careers and personal lives.

In the tradition of other plays by Howe such as Approaching Zanzibar, Painting Churches, and Birth After Birth, such small hands focuses on the relationships between parents and children. Perhaps most reminiscent of Painting Churches in terms of a poet father, an overbearing mother, and an artist child, such small hands takes a darker look at the wounds inflicted upon adolescents by their parents. Cassan-dra and Lucy's mother frequently exiles them when they do not meet her standards of behavior and appearance. Lucy recalls appearing before her mother in eclectic attire for church and being told that she was "an absolute fright, like a deformed fetus floating in a jar." Howe weaves themes of sight and perception throughout the play—the artistic visions of the artist-mother, the manner in which the sisters perceive their mother and themselves, the lens through which the mother views her daughters, and, of course, the hindsight of both the loved child and the less-loved child. Ironically, before her death, the girls' mother goes blind; "seeing was somehow beside the point," but Lucy learns that she can be herself while reminding the audience "all you have to do is look." While overly sentimental at points, such small hands adeptly navigates the waters of metaphor and lyricism in its portrait of the bonds—both broken and strengthened—between a mother and her daughters.

In Act 1, Franz walked onstage as Cassandra with perfectly coiffed thick hair, dressed in an opalescent beige suit, lavender scarf, pumps, and tasteful jewelry—the aesthetic epitome of success. In Act 2, on the other hand, Franz appeared as Lucy with thinning hair, dressed in a red turtleneck, paint-splattered denim overalls, a flannel shirt, socks, and sandals—an earthy mother figure, the polar opposite of Cassandra. The women exist in two different worlds—Cassandra has worked through three marriages and has no children while Lucy married once and enjoys her large family of children and grandchildren. Cassandra's documentary provides both women with an opportunity to come to terms with their turbulent childhood and the obsessions and instability of a mother whom they alternately worshipped and despised. Franz was most convincing as Lucy; her portrait of Cassandra was frequently an affected one with bursts of forced laughter and anger that made for a somewhat stilted performance. Despite Howe's sometimes subtly nuanced depiction of sibling rivalry and mother-daughter relationships, this production of the play was clearly a vehicle for Franz and her transformation from Cassandra in the first act to Lucy in the second act. Beyond this transformation, the play occasionally suffers from a lack of compelling narrative; once Howe has established early in the play that Cassandra and Lucy's mother was a self-absorbed, beauty-conscious artist, the characters' anecdotes about their mother, while often humorous, ring hollow and artificial. Although the play was written for Franz, the production represented a mismatching of actor and one-person show. Neither Franz's nor Howe's talents shined as brightly as they could.

The production was, however, strong in terms of costume, sound, and set design. As previously detailed, the characters' costumes, designed by Michael Krass, effectively conveyed...