The cast of "The Cherry Sisters Revisted." Photograph courtesy of R-S Theatrics
The Cherry Sisters Revisited is a drama made timely by our fascination with people who think they can sing, when the truth is a bit different. The Cherry sisters were five Marion, Iowa sisters who, not unlike celebrity manqué William Hung, convinced themselves they could sing in key. Late in the 19th century, their family act actually achieved a small measure of regional success on the county fair circuit, singing patriotic songs interspersed with corn-pone (and racist) humor and sanctimonious religious morality plays.
Gradually, crowds grew weary of their inability to carry a tune and insultingly flat "entertainment," and began to pelt them with rotten vegetables. The legend of the act that must be shielded from projectiles with chicken wire is no legend—the sisters eventually had to perform in just that way.
This begs the question, if they had to dodge cabbages onstage, surely they knew they were being mocked at every turn? And if they knew they were the butt of the joke, why keep performing?
The drama, written by Dan O'Brien (with occasional music by Michael Friedman), is reminiscent of the excellent production of Stephen Temperley's Souvenir in the Rep Studio a few years back. The latter concerned a socialite who thought she could sing, and was somehow oblivious to muffled guffaws coming from her audiences.
Cherry Sisters introduces the titular clan in long, drab skirts. These five actresses are much more pleasant in appearance than the actual Cherry sisters, who supposedly were anointed with looks that could stop a clock.
Why not make the women look more homely with yicchy make-up and hair? The playwright, we soon learn, has chosen to offer an interpretive, highly stylized look at the sisters' careers and lives. For instance, one sister in this pay will die in childbirth. In real life, they all died virgin spinsters. In the play, one sister strips down and tries to seduce the act's manager. In real life, these scripture-spouting matrons would sooner use pages from the bible as armpit wipes than flirt with an exemplar of the male gender.
So for the sake of this very free version of the story, the actresses don’t have to look ugly, and indeed, the story may spin off in any direction at all, independent of the truly compelling real-life story of the women. And spin off it does.
The act's history is related in a series of flashbacks centered on off-key singing and bad jokes. These are not bad jokes typical of the corny vaudeville of the period, but bad jokes with a slightly younger vintage. There is, for instance, the old chestnut: "What do you call a lonely bull out in the field by himself? Beef Stroganoff."
This joke is entirely too racy for the Cherry sisters. As in the examples above, it pulls us out of the hundred-year-old historical footnote of their tale and into the playwright's mind. Where are we going now? Some fantasy mash-up of Little House on the Prairie and masturbation humor, I guess? I wish that was as funny as it sounds.
Beth Wickenhauser as Addie, the hopeless would-be comedienne of the bunch, is adorable, and the entire cast deserves high praise for their ensemble work. Rachel Tibbetts as Effie carries the biggest load here, with the bulk of the lines and the responsibility for the widest range of emotional latitude in the cast. Her sincerity is crystal clear. Nicole Angeli plays Ella, the proverbial half-wit kicked in the head by a mule as a child. Her addled-child's gift for prophesying is creepy and clichéd both, but she handles the role with perfect conviction and poise. B. Weller is the lone male in the cast; he plays the clan's cynical father, "Pops," who rises from the grave to laugh at his daughters. Weller’s knack for hammy roles works here. Ellie Schwetye as Jessie and Mollie Amburgey as Lizzie jibe effortlessly with the rest of the group. You couldn't ask for a more committed and able cast, and director Kirsten Wylder's sure hand is evident.
But as the second act gets rolling, this non-linear narrative gets harder to comprehend. The action grows more abrupt, the speeches get more poetic, and I began to grope to make sense of it all. Shifts in time, perspective, and so on—along with seemingly random breaks in the fourth wall to acknowledge the audience—seem to accelerate as the climax grows nearer.
It doesn't help that several different male characters are all played by the same actor and all have same name, "Pops." It's just too confusing. During one scene Pops' own daughter appears to be seducing him, but that's not incest, because at that point in the play, he's not her father, but her manager, who’s also called Pops. It took me way too long to figure that out.
The real story of the Cherry sisters is more intriguing than this fever dream of a drama. Their atrocious act became the toast of Manhattan vaudeville. Audiences indulged a taste for sadism, jeering and throwing tomatoes at the women. The Cherry sisters' 1896 show, "Something Good, Something Sad," became so popular to loathe, it saved Oscar Hammerstein's struggling Olympia Music Hall.
The newspaper reviews were small gems of horror. The family was called "wretchedly poor, homely, ignorant, and without a trace of taste." One review was so mean-spirited (and creatively so) the sisters sued for libel. (The suit was dismissed by the judge.)
In The Cherry Sisters Revisited, Effie asks a pair of plaintive questions that are the soul of the piece. She wonders of the audience, "How do we know they're not lying when they clap?" and of her sisters, "We could just leave—why don't we?"
The answer to the latter question could easily have been money. The sisters made big bucks for being laughed at.
As to the former, near the drama's end, Jessie tells Effie that she (Jessie) and the other sisters knew all along they were hated; they were just playing along.
It's not a bombshell so much as yet another interpretive moment, refuted earlier in the play by various other interactions in this fuzzy realm of illogic.
The truth is ever-shifting, as is an audience member's allegiance to the play, messy and emotional like an abstract painting made by an exuberantly mad asylum inmate. It's impressive, but very difficult to say just what's going on here.
The Cherry Sisters Revisited runs through June 16; on June 13, tickets are “pay what you wish.” Performances are at The Chapel, 6238 Alexander. For more information, visit r-stheatrics.com/shows.
