Big Love

Seven brides for seven brothers, as in the old MGM musical, is an idea one has little trouble handling.  Raise the number to 50 brides (all sisters!) for 50 brothers, as Charles L. Mee has done in his wacky, uproarious, thought-provoking Big Love, a major hit at this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville, and the concept blows the mind and shatters laugh-meter records.  Mee has updated the oldest existing Greek drama, The Suppliant Women by Aeschylus, who had 50 brides vowing to murder 50 fiances on their wedding night.  Mee's 50 sisters have arrived at a luxurious Italian villa after fleeing Greece to avoid the 50 brothers (all of whom now live in America) to whom their patriarch betrothed them before they were born.  In the startling opening scene, the sister named Lydia (Carolyn Baeumler) rushes in, strips off her wedding gown, and jumps into a bathtub.  Two other sisters, Olympia (Aimee Guillot) and Thyona (Karenjune Sanchez) quickly follow, and all three launch into their reasons for the mass escape to what they think is a hotel.  When they hurl themselves into a saucy version of the Leslie Gore hit, You Don't Own Me, the audience goes wild. 

The war between the sexes, an age-old story, takes almost no prisoners on Mee's darkling plain of wit, mayhem, and wisdom -- the latter exemplified by a wise old Italian grandmother (Lauren Klein).  This war is not just a war of words, though the words are formidable weapons in themselves; Big Love is a ferociously physical play.  In separate set pieces the women and the men, who have arrived to claim them, throw themselves again and again to the wrestling-mat stage floor while shouting out their rage, frustration and contempt for the opposite sex.  What's not to love, admire, and praise about Big Love?