There are a lot of smart plays about working class families
but Take Your Pick Productions has found one with a nice kick for their
second outing. (They scored last season with THE LITTLE DOG LAUGHED.) John
Pollono’s LOST GIRLS (playing at the BCA through Jan. 21st) is
ostensibly about a runaway teen who may be making the same mistake her mother
(and her mother’s mother) made. The wiseacre grandmother (a formidable Christine
Power) quips that they’re improving with every successive generation: Her mother
was fourteen when she became pregnant; She herself was fifteen but her daughter
waited until she was sixteen!
The dialogue is saucy and sardonic—but also sweet. A sixteen year old boy (a charming Zach
Winston), in love for the first time, tells the object of his affection (the
brassy Lesley Anne Moreau) that it feels like “chewing on an electric cable.”
Director Melanie Garber has a spirited cast to deliver Pollono’s punches,
chiefly Audrey Lynn Sylvia as the intractable mother of the runaway, a woman
who does not want to accept help from her ex (an earnest Terrence P. Haddad)
and least of all, from his cloying new wife (a very funny Lauren Foster).
You’ll find that Pollono’s script keeps you guessing, not
going where you think it will, which is a treat nowadays when most new plays
are predictable and shopworn. Lucky us. Thanks to Take Your Pick, we get
to see the New England premiere!
