South Florida’s New Theater presents its second consecutive world premiere of the season in Winter,in which the adult he-and-she twins of Elinor Winter do battle at mom’s London home after her sudden death. There’s only the relatively young, live-in aide to explain the circumstances – until, that is, the discovery of a not-quite complete journal. But Robert Caisley’s play isn’t a mystery so much as a comedy with serious undertones. Under artistic director Ricky J. Martinez, it benefits from some well-pitched performances that signal a commitment to a script that can be needlessly repetitive.
The story: When we meet them, Peter and Christina, two-thirds of the far-flung Winter family, are on the phone arguing over how to handle funeral arrangements. Peter – a divorced, newly engaged, not-yet-tenured college professor in Seattle (Caisley himself teaches at the University of Idaho) – begs off making a trip to London, citing wedding plans and the book he’s writing. Christina – older by six minutes and a newly promoted sales rep for a pharmaceuticals company in Europe -- cites her job, her husband and her dog, but she suggests she and Peter each make a quick trip to England with a day of overlap. So it is that they end up at mom’s place and realize how little they know about her health, her friends and the woman who’s been her aide for the past few years.
Caisley’s Winter gives us a mother’s small happiness and sad resignation (through Elinor’s reading of her journal entries) and a lot of sibling rivalry – rooted in age, gender, hard-drinking liberal arts vs. the commerce of medical science. The aide, Sophie, barely registers during stretches in which she comes off more as a blank slate than a woman of mystery. But Barbara Sloan infuses Elinor with warmth despite a flock of Latin names for birds during her soliloquies; Sloan did a similar service as part of the cast of Caisley’s Kissing, which New Theater produced in 2009.
As twins in sometimes heated battle, Scott Douglas Wilson and Annemaria Rajala are persuasive, and Wilson’s body language goes a long way in wringing one last laugh out of Caisley’s string of jokes about restless leg syndrome.
The set by Nicole Quintana (she does double duty as Sophie) with lighting by Eric J. Cantrell produce an effect that’s almost literally a jewel box: The glass panes that open to the garden approximate a many-karated emerald green for day and a peacock blue for night. The look and performances lift a play that sometimes bogs down.
