Never mind its love triangle (quadrangle?), Triptych is for and about theater folk, even if its author, Edna O'Brien, is best known for novels that have been banned in her native Ireland. This stage work may be best enjoyed by audiences who like playing gotcha with references to plays from earlier centuries. Quick, now: Shaw, Shakespeare, Webster?
Audiences in Fort Lauderdale have another reason: a solid production by Inside Out Theatre Company with a standout performance by Lisa Morgan as Pauline, the hard-drinking ex-actress wife of a philandering playwright, Henry, who hasn't had a hit in a while. Completing the three panels of the story: Clarissa (Sandra Ives), the mistress, a working actress; and Brandy (Kim Morgan Dean), daughter of Henry and Pauline.
Henry doesn't appear in the play, but he's the central figure, for although thecharacters are named in the script, in the program they're listed only as Wife, Daughter and Mistress, reflecting their relationships to him.
Tyler Smith delivers a set for Triptych that takes its cue from the title. There's a red-draped dressing room for the mistress/actress, a pink bedroom with conga drums for the punkish teenager, and an Asian-styled sitting room for the wife. But though the women have ties to the same man and vie with various tactics and degrees of success for his attention, the actresses aren't tethered to their designated areas.
Pauline shows up at the theater where Clarissa is performing, an early intrusion by a woman who harbors personal and professional antagonism against the mistress. The two face off again later as a drunken Pauline unleashes a coarse and threatening seduction of Clarissa; Sandra Ives holds her own, but this is Pauline's scene, and Lisa Morgan delivers an uncomfortably good turn.
Too often, though, Triptych gets tripped up by invoking literary allusions and backstage antics.
