Strollers Theatre's "Ripcord" is Quite a Ride
I have never been skydiving. But in Strollers Theatre’s production of Ripcord, by the David Lindsay-Abaire, I began to understand why the playwright used the experience as a central metaphor.
Part way through the first act, a young, fearless, and incredibly enthusiastic skydiving instructor named Lewis explains to a panicking newcomer: “You’re gonna like this Abby! It’s just like life! You get shoved out into nothingness, then it’s a long, terrifying free fall to certain death! Which is why you gotta pull the ripcord, baby! Slow yourself down and look around while you can!”
The scene also encapsulates the tone of Ripcord, which bounces around from amusing and thoughtful, to ridiculous and touching. Like trying to manage a fall from the sky, it focuses on the inevitable tug-of-war between the things we try to control and the things we can’t.
The play begins as a straightforward odd-couple story, centered on two older women who are paired together in the same room in an assisted living center. Abby (Marcy Weiland) is a prickly grouch while her roommate Marilyn (Peggy Rosin) is a Little Mary Sunshine. Of course they collide in predictable ways, but refreshingly, the “cute little old lady in the nursing home” trope is nowhere to be seen this script. Instead, it is quickly clear that these women are capable, intelligent, and even devious.
The larger plot revolves around a bet they make, and the extremes each of them will go to, in order to win. As a prize for the winner, grumpy Abby wants the room to herself. Marilyn simply wants to switch beds so that she can have a better view and more sunshine. Their challenge is to make the other one feel either anger or fear in a real way – forcing each other to let down their defenses and be vulnerable. And it turns out that dragging Abby skydiving against her will is just a warm-up to the desperate measures these women go to. Their ridiculous and comical gotcha games fill the second half of the play in ways that truly delight and surprise the audience.
As the crusty misanthrope Abby, Weiland works hard to fill her scenes with bluster and snarl, while Rosin sails easily to her sunny place as the relentlessly calm and cheerful Marilyn, a gal who’s seen it all and has decided to rise above. The referee in this fight to the finish is nurse Scotty (Lennox Forrester) an aspiring actor who works at the assisted living facility to make ends meet. As the straight person to the antics of these elderly foes, Forrester is excellent as a stand-in for the audience, who becomes more alarmed and dismayed at the lengths these women will go to, simply to antagonize one another.
Just when you think the play has left you in a freefall of consistently accelerating, dangerous hijinks, the playwright pulls the ripcord and we float through some harrowing real life complications that give us -- and the characters -- enough backstory to provide sobering insight into their lives.
Taking over the black box Evjue Stage at the Bartell, Erin Baal’s creative set design provides settings that are both realistic and fantastic, accommodating everything from the women’s dreary, shared institutional bedroom, to a large-scale haunted house, to the hold of an airplane, to an enormous blue sky punctuated with fluffy clouds where the characters prepare to open their parachutes. Large picture frames on each side of the bedroom stand in beautifully for framed pictures of family – or the empty spaces that are left, where family once was.
Director Sean Langenecker leans into the play’s bizarre production requirements and its shifts in tone, fulfilling every jump scare and wacky gag included in the script, as well as grounding the more complicated emotional moments. An accomplished deviser, they easily transport us from place to place in scenes that seem, at first glance, impossible to put on stage. The supporting cast is buoyed by Maria Cina, who plays several characters with real passion and conviction. She is delightful as Marilyn’s daughter, an equally tough competitor and willing accomplice to many of her mother’s schemes.
Ripcord ends with an unexpectedly soft landing, not only giving the audience hope for the relationship between mismatched roommates, but also a glimpse of the release that can come, allowing repressed emotions back into your life. It’s an intelligent, surprising, funny and thoughtful evening — one that was worth waiting a whole pandemic for.