Photos by Michael Brosilow. Top: Mierka Girten (from left), Natalie West and Kirsten Fitzgerald. Center (from left) Larry Grimm, West, Danny McCarthy and Fitzgerald. Bottom: West (left) and Fitzgerald.
There are some parties that are best watched from an unseen sideline, the furtive voyeur at the train wreck. Such is the case with A Red Orchid Theatre's Abigail’s Party, a Titanic of a cocktail soiree anchored by Kirsten Fitzgerald as Hostess in the mode of Mr. Rogers as Deathstar Commander.
And although we’re deep in the wonderful world of Ensemble with the seamless and hilariously indelible party of five under Shade Murray’s insightful direction, it all begins and ends (literally, in the case of one character) with Fitzgerald’s Beverly, a woman who uses cigarettes and cocktails like instruments of mass and mutual destruction. Alone on stage for a few marvelously defining moments at the top of the show, Fitzgerald creates a mood and a character with little more than a (pre-born again) Donna Summer track, a preposterously serious sexyface from the Victoria Beckham school of modeling and one of those unfortunate Quiana pantsuits that were the last word in en vogue round about 1978. The vibe is as relentlessly groovy as the mod mood lighting and the pineapple-and-cheese-chunks canapés. Beverly is determined that everyone have fun. Even if she has to brutalize them with the hi-fi. 
Playwright Mike Leigh’s shocker unspools in real time as the crude, superficial niceties of Beverly’s party deteriorate into ugly, unexpected revelations and not-so-quiet desperation.There are, we learn, fates worse than death within the dark realms of the bored bourgeoisie. One look at the yellow pleather couch where Beverly holds court (and hostages) and one senses this truth on some subconscious level. The leap to consciousness arrives as chitchat gives way to Heimlich maneuvers and fake, shrill laughter to authentic, guttural retching.
Leigh developed his blackly comic tragedy through improvisation, making a fluid, spontaneous-seeming delivery of this tricky script paramount. A Red Orchid’s cast nails it. And makes it look easy. The company’s last show garnered heaps of well-deserved hype thanks to its Oscar-nominee star (Michael Shannon) and a performance that, as long as we’re name-checking awards, would have been Tony-worthy had it been eligible. Here’s hoping Abigail’s Party keeps the well-deserved buzz going. Everybody on stage is marquee-worthy.Larry Grimm, for example, is unrecognizable as Laurence, Beverly’s at once bone-tired and tightly-wound spouse. It’s not just that he’s sporting a ‘70s porn ‘stache, (which if memory serves, was roughly the male equivalent of the Quiana pantsuit.) He physically transforms his long, lanky, dominant and leading-man physicality into a fellow crushed into misery by a passive-aggressive spouse. Grimm makes it despairingly clear that Laurence only has but one way to escape being ground down to powder by the grasping, charmless vulgarity of Beverly. And he takes it, poor sot.
Equally vivid are Mierka Girten and Danny McCarthy as Angela and Tony, newcomers to the neighborhood. Girten wears the perfect plaster smile of a woman rigorously determined to project happiness yet unable to vanquish the sheer, deer-in-the-headlights terror from her eyes. In the final scene, Angela reveals her workplace self - highly skilled, clear-headed and compassionate. It’s a woman utterly unlike the trivial, timid and anxious-to-please party guest, and it gives Girten a chance to showcase her formidable range. Then there’s McCarthy, monosyllabic for most of the evening, yet conveying depths of complex disillusionment and defiant carnality with a well-placed stare or a boozily groping hand. As Susan, the mouse-like mother of the always off-stage, 15-year-old Abigail, Natalie West provides the sadly ineffectual moral compass to the evening. Abigail’s party (also off-stage) has poor Susan sick (literally) with worry that host Beverly does nothing to allay and everything to exacerbate.
What with its older/younger couple dynamic, and Beverly’s domineering cruelty, Abigail’s Party inevitably evokes shades of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Leigh doesn’t offer the blistering psychological denouement of Albee’s masterpiece, but Abigail is rich with the humor of sadism inflicted on the feckless (“I wouldn’t have married him if I had lived with him first,” Beverly says of her husband.) and a surprising finale all its own.
When the music of Elvis and Beethoven become weapons of scorched-earth humiliation, you know you’re dealing with something at once shattering and shatteringly funny. Murray hears the pulse of the piece with unswerving clarity and allows the audience to listen in. The result is a party you don’t want to miss, even if you end up thankful it’s not one you actually attended.
Abigail’s Party continues through March 28 at A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells. Tickets are $$25 - $30. For more information, click here go to www.aredorchidtheatre.org.
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