Her exasperated mother and hugely pregnant sister vehemently agree that Pandora's determination to marry a much older man, a philandering poet who wears a ponytail, will indeed make for an "Impossible Marriage." They'd like to sabotage it but find themselves grimly expecting it to go through as they scheme and vent in the garden (nice design by Jeremy Artigue) on the family estate outside Savannah, Georgia.
Beth Henley's wacky Southern women and their off-the-wall repartee provide delightful watching and listening at Horse Cave Theater in new artistic director Robert F. Brock's season opener, directed in a sprightly fashion by Ron Satlof. In a crackerjack cast, Brock's performance as the awkward and timorous Reverend Jonathan Lawrence is hilariously endearing. Airily noting that Edvard Lunt (Alex Cherington), her groom-to-be, is a "hairy old goat with liver spots -- death spots, she calls them -- on his hands and gray hair on his chest, Pandora Kingsley (Susanna Harris) nevertheless is all set to marry this man who divorced his wife of 23 years and has no contact with the seven children he sired. "You are going to be his nursemaid," Lynn Gilcrease, extremely good as Pandora's acerbic, world-weary sister Floral Whitman, warns her. Pandora's head was turned, it seems, when Lunt "turned her into a legend in his book."
"What have I raised?" their mother Kandall Kingsley (the excellent Donna Freeburn, as picture-perfect Southern lady, steel magnolia variety) exclaims in honeyed tones as she goes forward with preparations for the ceremony. Then Lunt's grown son Sidney (Chad Patrick Smith) arrives unexpectedly, unrecognized by his father, to announce that his mother plans to kill herself by jumping out of an attic window if the marriage goes through. Sidney adds that he and all his siblings plan to kill themselves, too. Marriage is an "antiquated institution" anyway, proclaims disgruntled Sidney.
Playwright Henley's gift for comedy has always had a core of sadness to it. Here it comes through most forcefully when the truth about Floral's marriage to her handsome, ever-faithful husband Jonsey (Christopher Gilbert) is revealed. Loose ends are tied up a bit too tidily as the wedding day arrives and giddy Pandora floats to her groom's side in a sky blue dress with angel wings attached. Maybe she was trying to demonstrate -- despite the fact that people were calling this one impossible -- that marriages are made in Heaven, as Tennyson wrote.
