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(From left) Sara Shatzel, Mary Beth Caschetta and Nikki Wing in “And Sophie Comes Too.” |
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Cohn play morphs crisis into humor
By Ann Wood & Kaimi Rose Lum
Banner Staff
They may be sisters, but they are nothing alike. When a family crisis unfolds, Barbara worries about it affecting the pending adoption of her daughter. Rose, the perfect Connecticut mother, is ready to explode, and the audience discovers that Sandra wants a penis. If it sounds funny, it is. That’s just how playwright Meryl Cohn likes it — even if it’s not necessarily how she meant “And Sophie Comes Too” to turn out.
“I set out to write this as a serious play, but it soon turned on its own,” she says, adding that her characters don’t necessarily do what she expects. “You think, ‘Wait a minute, I didn’t know she would say that or do that.’ The relationship between the sisters is funny. They sort of have snappy ways of talking to each other.”
The inadvertent comedy “And Sophie Comes Too,” Cohn’s fourth full-length Women’s Week play in the same number of years, opens at 8 p.m. Saturday (it continues to run nightly through Oct. 15, with an additional 2 p.m. matinee that final day), at The Provincetown Theater, 238 Bradford St., Provincetown. Tickets for the Provincetown Theatre Company production are $20, $18 for PTC members, students and seniors, and can be purchased online at ptowntix.com or by calling (508) 487-9793.
“Basically, it’s about three sisters who are really different from each other in this New York Jewish family, and they’re coping with this kind of trauma in really a funny way,” Cohn says, adding that their mother falls into a coma at an “inconvenient” time. “I can’t really say that the characters are based on the people I know.”
But Cohn, who has a younger sister and brother, says she most relates to Barbara, the oldest sister in the play.
“Sometimes I’m surprised at what she would do because it’s so different from me,” she says.
Cohn’s girlfriend Mary Beth Caschetta plays that oldest sister, while Lynda Sturner, a playwright and actress who got her start on Broadway in “Oliver,” stars as Sophie, the mother. It also features Nikki Wing as the youngest sister Sandra, and Sara Shatzel as Rose. Jane MacDonald, Braunwyn Jackett and Denise Gaylord also make appearances in the play, which is directed by Tom Gladwell. Gladwell is an award-winning filmmaker and director of off-Broadway plays in New York.
“I did pick him. He moved here recently from New York and he’s been coming to the [PTC Playwriting] Lab, and I could tell that he had a sensibility that I liked,” Cohn says of Gladwell, adding that she knew he understood the play.
The lab has been very important to Cohn, who realized at around 10 or 12 years old that she wanted to be involved in the theater, even if she didn’t know how — until she started writing plays as an undergraduate at Smith College.
“And I instantly loved it,” she says. “When I found playwriting, I really found my form.”
She studied playwriting in graduate school at New York University — and took a break.
“It was like 12 or 13 years passed before I started writing plays again,” Cohn says, adding that when she picked up the pen “I met a couple of people that were in the lab.”
The lab became the place where she could try out her words. Unlike other genres of writing, it’s important to hear plays-in-progress read aloud, Cohn says.
“A play could sound very different in a head than when you hear voices saying your words,” she says. “The aspect of the coming to life … the aspect of being in the theater with a group of people that are sharing an experience … is really it for me.”
This new play is also “it” for her.
“This one is my favorite play at the moment. Sometimes I’m not sure. Sometimes I’m not sure until the production,” Cohn says.
She may love the play, but that doesn’t mean she’s easy to live with during its rehearsal. She thinks it might be because she’s working the play until the curtain comes up.
“Oh my god yes, I’m very nervous. If you’re the kind of playwright that just hands it off to somebody … maybe it’s less stressful and it’s less stressful on the person you live with,” she says.
awood@provincetownbanner.com
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In the Arts
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Oct 6th, 2005