Review | DramaDogs Celebrates the Power of Community Theater with 30th Anniversary Production
‘HERE! This Moment for Women’ Showcases a Strong Ensemble of Actors and Ideas
A spotlight falls on empty chairs with stark white cushions. The audience — guided by co-directors and lifelong artistic collaborators E. Bonnie Lewis and Ken Gilbert — takes a deep, shared breath together before sounds of rainfall fill the intimate black box theater.
The things that make community theater so powerful and incredibly important are on display in DramaDogs’ recent production, HERE! This Moment for Women, which also celebrates DramaDogs’ 30th anniversary, was presented at Center Stage Theater October 17-20. Consisting of a curated selection of 15 short plays and monologues performed by a strong five-person ensemble of local actors, HERE! This Moment for Women places women’s stories and experiences at the focal point. Written by EM Lewis and James Still, the scenes feature women of all ages and are set in various time periods and locations, some as short as 20 seconds (or in Still’s COVID-19-friendly terms, the amount of time one should spend scrubbing their hands while washing them).
“Drop-Off Day” is a comedic standout, featuring Isabel Watson as a girl getting dropped off at college and Candice Goodman as her mother. Goodman is anxious and enthusiastic in turn, her daughter’s loudest cheerleader but still visibly distraught by their impending separation. Watson reveals her own anxieties as the scene progresses: Will she make friends? Will she be okay on her own? Both mother and daughter possess great comedic timing, balancing the jokes (“Don’t do drugs!” Goodman wails, squeezing her daughter to her chest from the driver’s seat) with a sense of love and connection between the two characters as they both find the strength to take on this next phase of their lives.
The show sings in heartfelt moments like “Plaudite, amici, commedia finita est,” where a dying woman stubbornly holds onto every precious moment of her remaining life. In this short scene, Death dons a strappy white dress and saunters into the hospital room with one spiky red heel in hand like a college girl heading back to her dormitory after a wild night out. The understanding and mutual appreciation between these two complicated women — poignantly portrayed by Santa Barbara theater veteran Kathy Marden and Isabel Watson — is mesmerizing to witness, asking the audience to consider how we would greet Death if it came slinking into our room.
In “Evening in Paris,” Meredith McMinn wholly commits to her character as the proprietor of a small-town diner and adds a sense of grounding and steadiness to the scene. What originally begins as a somewhat clichéd tale of returning to your hometown becomes something deeper as McMinn’s character, Grace, reveals that while she has long since accepted the circumstances of her life, it fails to bring her any sort of joy. She dismisses the romantic ideals of diner customer Madge, played by Candice Goodman, as naïveté, but when Madge leaves a vial of expensive perfume labeled Evening in Paris behind, Grace’s longing takes shape. She can’t help but reach for the bottle. The scent evokes a change in McMinn’s expression as her face relaxes, a smile gently turning the corners of her mouth upward as a spark within her visibly reignites.
While every piece in HERE! This Moment for Women tells its own distinctive story, there is a common thread uniting each — a shared understanding and a proclamation demanding recognition and attention. We will not be invisible, these women tell us. They insist on taking up their rightful space, demanding to be seen and heard.
