Speaking Elephant

Two actresses stand erect on the stage, emitting occasional throaty sighs and grunts. Their right arms gesture. They're clad in gray from head-top turban to the toe-top ends of their wide-cut pants – otherwise called, appropriately in this case, elephant-leg pants. Their characters are elephants, and soon enough they're talking in a new play of much heart and many laughs getting a sterling premier in Fort Lauderdale by The Women's Theater Project.

The play is Speaking Elephant. Winky and Wanda are based on namesake elephants that made news in 2004 when the Detroit Zoo decided on ethical grounds to relocate them to a sanctuary in California. That way the pair could be with other elephants and roam grassy acreage all year long rather than spend cold winters standing on the concrete floor of a tiny building – which is where most of this play takes place.

They're getting on in years. Winky had a career in the circus but now suffers from arthritis and a foot abscess, and from the chatty curiosity of Wanda, slightly younger, who's had a quieter life and yearns for Winky to share stories of the road. They've lived together in close quarters for 15 years. These days, Winky is wary of the young attendant, who seems to her to be talking faster than usual – not that Winky or Wanda understand much English. As the nameless young attendant feeds them and tends to their sore feet, she talks up the benefits of the move to her "girls": "You're on assisted living. You need more."

So it's clear Speaking Elephant has something to say about both pachyderms and people. But this isn't some "Animal Farm" allegory. The play, written by Michigander-turned-South-Floridian Terry Lawrence and under the deft direction of Genie Croft, carries its symbolic parallels lightly.

The actresses playing elephants use their right arms as trunks, their left arms still at their sides. Angie Radosh as ex-circus performer Winky gestures gracefully with her right arm/trunk. Sally Bondi as Wanda, "the inquisitive one" who's spent more years than Winky in zoos, waves her ersatz trunk broadly. Each savors the name of a homeland: "Aaay-sia," "Innn-di-a." But when they share recollections of their separate captures as young elephants, the writing and performances combine to produce something akin to horrific dual arias.

Pilar Uribe as the attendant, whose relationships falter because the guys don't share her enthusiasm for the elephants, leavens the proceedings without silliness. This attendant is patient with the animals, reassuring, cajoling, speaking as if they can comprehend (Lawrence's elephants use only grunts when she's within earshot, English when they're alone). But there are more complications than communciation. A national zoo-industry organization is opposing the plan to remove popular elephants from a zoo to a sanctuary. The attendant is way more understanding of her ex-boyfriends than she is of that zoo group.