The workshop reading of SELKIE WOMAN, written by Zoe Stanton-Savitz and directed by Delia Dumont, was a fabulous exercise in understanding how the theatrical sausage gets made.
A two-hander about female friendships, sexual awakening, and the power of being able to name your trauma, SELKIE WOMAN examines the relationship of two young women when they are at their most vulnerable.
Scene one features Brianna Demiliio as JJ and Pauline Lara as Layla, who grapple with the trials and tribulations of being a 12-year-old girl. Set against the backdrop of a sleepover that grows increasingly troubling, Layla and JJ begin to explore themselves both literally and metaphorically. Stanton-Savitz is very much interested in exploring how young girls attempt to
find their identity in a world that is fundamentally hostile to them, and both Lara and Demilio do a stellar job of portraying two young girls who are traumatized, but don’t quite have the worldly experience to understand exactly what is wrong.
Scene two brings us forward in time to a now college-age Layla and JJ, who have grown apart but still hold within them something that cares deeply for the other. Lara and Demilio are still brilliant here, and Dumont’s direction does a fantastic job of portraying a very distant yet very intimate relationship, but unfortunately it’s where the script loses steam. A lot of the momentum that is built up in scene one is lost in the transition, and it’s never able to properly recover due to constantly needing to bring the audience up to speed with events that all happened off stage. The change of location feels necessary as a way to help us understand the thesis of the show, but SELKIE WOMAN could probably take another pass at the exact mechanics of where and whenthis takes place.
SELKIE WOMAN is a very powerful piece, and one that definitely comes from a place that Stanton-Savitz and Dumont are deeply in tune with. With a truly fabulous first scene, many of the issues with the back half are largely structural, and the script knows exactly what it wants to be. The final moments of SELKIE WOMAN do bring us back to that fateful sleepover, and is a very heartfelt capstone on the production. I’m very glad I got to see SELKIE WOMAN yesterday, and I am very excited to catch it again tomorrow.
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