REVIEW of Blood Orange, written by Abigail Duclos, directed by Vernice Miller at A.R.T.:

Blood Orange is really well written, directed, choreographed and acted, but for reasons that I don’t really understand, it did not resonate with me.  But if you want to see quality theater by a young writer and cast you should see this show.

Duclos avoids all the mistakes that young playwrights tend to make.  Her characters are fully developed as soon as they appear on stage.  There is no making the audience suffer through the writer “finding out” who the characters are.  She knows when her play is over and does not create multiple times when the audience believes the show should be ended.  Duclos allows her characters to be whoever they have become as she got to know them. We cannot be sure that they are the characters she intended to write, but she embraces whoever the characters became in the process of writing. This is a very talented writer.

Director Vernice Miller wisely keeps her characters away from center stage where they may have become cliches. Her actors employing the entire space, usually far right or left to tell the story of abuse, abandonment and unbalanced irrationality.  She elicits the questioning that each character has about the other from each of the three actresses. 

Luisa Galatti (Faye), Ana Moioli (Eden) and Maria Muller (Georgia) perfectly capture the emotional inconsistencies and extremes that you would expect to find in teenage girls.  Galatti’s Faye tries to normalize her life where she has been sexually exploited by her mother’s junkie boyfriend and abandoned by her birth mother, her father through suicide and the breakdown of the stepmother who abandons her mentally and physically to deal with her own grief.   Her lack of success is not surprising.   Moioli’s Eden suffers from the emotional (and perhaps sexual) abuse of her father and her mother’s failure to protect her.  Muller’s Georgia perhaps has the most stable family which is why it is not surprising that she meets her fate at the hands of her two less stable friends.

If Duclos makes any error, it may be putting Faye’s stepmother on stage.  She did have a good reason to do it since the audience did have to know that she was not dead in her bedroom as Faye went on living in the apartment, but perhaps a voice over might have been more precise and just as effective.

I may never have fully invested in this play, but I recognize that this is a fine piece of theater and if you are moved by the horrors that may result from the abuse of young people then you should see Blood Orange and celebrate this fine production.