Inspired by “Brides in the Bath” murders in England at the start of the 20th century, The Drowning Girls presents a haunting ghost story. It’s told by three victims from their graves, reproduced in tubs of water in a tiled atmosphere of real and metaphorically sad blues. How could they have they turned over themselves and their possessions to the hardly prepossessing man in the photo on the far wall? Having donned their wedding dresses, they enacted meeting, courtship, love of and marriage to George Smith in order of the lengths (from months to a day) of their life with him. Romance-minded Bessie (Nicole Jeannine Smith, dreamy with remembrance) was first to succumb to his charming ways, so different than his later roughness. With Bessie isolated from family and friends, George could fill her empty life with a dance. Is that how she (supposedly) gave him a disease that made him leave, then return a year later for what he’d need to get well? In Carley Cornelius’s sprightly Alice, George found a rebel against her strict family who met but didn’t take to him. She didn’t meet his but was swept up and away in a whirlwind courtship. In only two weeks, he had changed toward her. By then her life was insured, and he had all she owned. Spinster Margaret, 39 years old and doomed to a socially irrelevant future, grasped at the chance to “legitimize” herself with a secret marriage. But instead of George loving his bride of a day (strong looking but resigned Katherine Michelle Tanner), he told her she had a fit during the night. Could she be too sick to remember it? With her signature giving him power to “help” her, she was left in her bath. A cleaning woman found the body -- “Nearer My God to Thee” as the ghosts sang ironically. After news of Margaret’s demise reached Alice’s family, they were able to see and report similarities in the deaths as well as discover stories of other drowned girls. At last, George Smith faced the court in a three-cases trial. Recaps of the girls’ stories indicate the types and extent of his violence. But, without leaving the usual traces of violence, how exactly did he kill? A demonstration of the deed proves breath-taking. Director Brendan Ragan elicits from Urbanite’s technical and artistic talents just the right details to unite the real and surreal throughout. At George’s sentencing, water sprays out of the girls’ shower heads, symbolically drowning him. The girls laugh. In Urbanite’s up close and personal space, the effect is devastating.
