Babes with blades - Chicago Reader

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ReaderRecommended Athena WritersTheatre: 'What’s lovely about Gardner’s play is how skillfully it intertwines the anxieties and doubts common to all adolescents with the growing confidence of the two as friendly competitors.' | kerryreid

, we meet two high school girls who are competitive fencers. Over the brisk 80-minute course of Jessica Fisch’s staging, Athena and Mary Wallace feint, parry, lunge, riposte, and peel back layers of themselves even while wearing the protective garb of their sport.

For whatever reason, women talking honestly about their lives without reference to male definitions of conflict and resolution still feels like a radical proposition . Sure, the two-character setup of Gardner’s play does mean that there are some binary differences between the two girls. Athena lives with her single dad in New York City and slips into nightclubs where her older sister DJs. By contrast, Mary Wallace is a more sheltered suburbanite with a bookworm bent.

But what’s lovely about Gardner’s play is how skillfully it intertwines the anxieties and doubts common to all adolescents with the growing confidence of the two as friendly competitors. The precise fight choreography of David Blixt and Christian Kelly-Sordelet, which plays out on Arnel Sancianco’s cool minimalist runway set , provides cunning physical metaphors for the ways they get close, pull back, and meet each other head-on.

 

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