In "The Smell of the Kill," the Port City Playhouse comedy now playing at the Lee Center, three wives who are living unsatisfying lives find themselves with the unexpected opportunity to start over.
All they have to do is let their husbands freeze to death.
That may sound a little gruesome to be a foundation for a comedy, but in the hands of playwright Michelle Lowe and the performances of three local actresses of note, the concept works. It works, in part, because Lowe found ways to take the troubling portions of the plot off stage and leave the spotlight on the three women and their hopes, dreams and disappointments.
Those disappointments obviously include their husbands, but the audience never sees the men, never gets to know them as real people; as a result, the audience isn’t quite as disturbed by their demise as they might otherwise be. It also works because director Scott Olson was able to cast Margaret Bush, Gail Seavey and Ketie Gentic as the three wives.
Margaret Bush plays the instigator of the plan, a woman who’s falling from the financially secure and socially admirable position she’s come to enjoy because her husband has not only lost his source of income, he’s going to jail for embezzlement. In some other plays, one would expect to see this character rise to the challenge of supporting her mate in his hour of need. Not in Lowe’s script — here she’s absolved of any responsibility to her spouse by his having wronged her just as much as any of the victims of his financial frauds. As a result, Bush is free to bring a chipper flippancy to her character as she gives voice to her reactions to her new status.
Gail Seavey is the older and presumably wiser wife who has lived with disappointment so long that she doesn’t even recognize it — until her friends release the pent-up anger in her by pointing out what she has missed, reminding her of what she expected of life. Seavey finds a way to make the part seem less whiny than it might otherwise have been; and, in the process, keeps the emphasis of the evening on the humor and not on the bitterness of the situation.
Finally, there is Katie Gentic, who is very good as the youngest of the trio, one whose husband maintains a façade of newlywed-ish puppy love in public but is strictly hands-off in private. Gentic takes the character from mildly perturbed to murderously angry in measured steps that have a laugh line at each stop.
The pay unfolds in Bush’s character’s kitchen after the three couples have had dinner. The women retire to the kitchen while the husbands sit trading hunting stories in the dining room. It is Lowe’s gimmick that you never see the dining room — the husbands are heard but not seen. For this production, three actors are off-stage reading their lines. When their bravado reaches its peak, Bush’s character’s husband takes them down to the basement to see the new walk-in refrigerated meat locker he has installed to store the deer he kills during hunting season. The door shuts behind them when they are in the locker and, since there is no inside release for the door lock, they will freeze if their wives don’t respond to their banging on the walls.
What’s a disgruntled woman to do? That is the question that the three women discuss, debate and finally resolve in a spirited exchange of often entertaining observations and opinions.
Jarret Baker designed a nifty, realistic set of the kitchen, using real kitchen cabinets which will be offered for sale after the production ends its run this weekend. He placed that set far forward enough on the Lee Center’s overly large stage to keep it from seeming too far removed from the audience. Each of the actresses saw to their own costuming which means that each is dressed as she believes her character would dress, right down to the underwear that plays a point in the plot.
Brad Hathaway reviews music and theater in Virginia, Washington and Maryland as well as Broadway, and edits Potomac Stages, a Web site covering theater in
the region (www.PotomacStages.com). He can be reached at
Brad@PotomacStages.com.