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    Review: OSU Theatre Presents Her Naked Skin

    Her Naked Skin zooms in on a pivotal year in the fight for women’s rights, 1913-1914. Its scenes present snapshots of the suffragettes’ adaptation of tactics from the Irish Rebellion, including vandalism and hunger strikes, before they suspended the campaign in a gesture of unity during WWI. The spine of the play, and its strongest scenes, focuses on the Upstairs/Downstairs-esque love affair between Lady Celia Cain (Kylie Logan) and working class Eve Douglas (Erin A. Parsons).

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    The intermingling of class — and the inherent inequality that always rips apart the fairytale of love across classes — gets a fresh, exciting look with the performances of Logan and Parsons. At its best, the play and this production, understand that any kind of change, in the world or yourself, is a lonely endeavor with no assured payoff.

    Logan radiates determination leavened with the heartbreak of that truth growing too loud to ignore. Parsons, as someone who didn’t have the safety net to step off this cliff, plays Douglas with reserves of strength leavened with flashes of deep insecurity. An unflinching sequence of the horrors of force-feeding perpetrated on Parsons’ Douglas, and a final soliloquy from Logan, hint at how good this rich material could have been.

    Ronda Christie’s suffragette leader Florence Boorman is consistently delightful. Emma Farrenkopf makes the chilling most of a brief scene where her Emily Wilding Davison’s protest turns into assured death and sets the wheels of the plot in motion, all without sensationalizing.

    Jacob Oommen Athyal, as Celia’s husband William Cain, provides able support and stands out as the only male character not played to such cartoonish extremes it seems the revolution they’re afraid of is a Benny Hill episode. The production does the audience and history a disservice. In amplifying the grinning, bawdy gestures, it downplays the real evil of smugness and desperation to let nothing change.

    Accents all over the place amplify that negative sensation, and sound problems (mostly corrected by the second act) create an effect that alternates between Are You Being Served and inaudible.

    The other poison running through Dugdale’s production is torpor. A massive set, designed by Cade M. Sikora, effectively dominates, implying the grey concrete of an oppressive past and present, even featuring a staircase to nowhere, on a turntable. Problems arise from this when the play hard stops after every scene for the set to rotate.

    This rotation implies longer shifts in time than the play intends, leading to audience confusion, and makes an already long play (2 hours 30 minutes with one intermission) feel interminable. The characters can’t develop a rhythm when every few minutes the action grinds to a halt so we can all admire that set.

    OSU Theatre provides flashes of what made Her Naked Skin (the first original play by a woman ever staged on the Olivier) such a hit on the London stage. Unfortunately, they require more picking through the detritus than the evening rewards.

    Her Naked Skin runs through March 7 with performances at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and more info, visit theatre.osu.edu/events/her-naked-skin.

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    Richard Sanford
    Richard Sanfordhttp://sanfordspeaks.blogspot.com/
    Richard Sanford is a freelance contributor to Columbus Underground covering the city's vibrant theatre scene. You can find him seeking inspiration at a variety of bars, concert halls, performance spaces, museums and galleries.
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