“Miss Witherspoon” isn’t really her name. It’s a nickname that the other playful spirits in the afterlife have given her, on account of the “murky, brown tweed suit" appearance of her aura. Maryamma, her sanguine, sari-ed personal spirit counselor, elaborates: she’s been dubbed Miss Witherspoon because of how much she reminds everyone of the bothersome spinster type common in Agatha Christie novels. Miss Witherspoon is not amused.
In fact, she’s pretty bitter about a number of things. A suicide in her last life, New Yorker Miss Witherspoon (Janet Mitchko) has said good riddance to the ways of the earth, and would be glad to remain in the afterlife indefinitely — although she’d really prefer to be let into the “general anesthesia” version of heaven, usually reserved for Jews, atheists, and other non-believers. But Maryamma (Robyne Parrish, sonorous and soothing) and the other spirits have different plans for her. In fact, they want her to do the unthinkable: return to earth for a whole new reincarnated life. It would be a mighty understatement to say that Miss Witherspoon resists this in Christopher Durang’s shrill and wacky but feel-good comedy Miss Witherspoon, directed by Christopher Schario at the Public Theatre.
Mitchko’s Miss Witherspoon is a blustery, misanthropic storm of ill will and irony. Take all the snarkiest and most anti-social qualities of the entire Seinfeld cast, and you might begin to approach Miss Witherspoon’s grating yet somehow endearing ethos. She stomps and fumes her way over Christopher Price’s evocative set of pale blue piers, oblivious to Bart Garvey’s lovely projected landscapes of celestial light. Her will is fierce, and fiercely sarcastic, but it’s not quite a match for the mellifluous, unflappable Maryamma and a spirit support network that includes Gandalf (Dale Place) and a curvy black female version of Jesus Christ (Leticia Eulalee Moore, spectacularly).
So Miss Witherspoon is sent back to earth a number of times, each time finding herself inserted into a baby, with a different set of parental figures (a series of exaggerated character roles played nicely by the energetic Place and Sheila Stasack). Durang’s writing gets rather harsh for some of these scenes, and plays up the crudeness so much that the slapstick stereotypes become less funny than disturbing. When Miss Witherspoon is born to unsparingly clichéd Southern white trash junkies, Mommy punches, shoots up, calls her young daughter a pig, and frequently tells her to fuck off. But Mommy rants that her daughter should actually be thanking her — after all, she asks, has she ever poured boiling water on her daughter’s private parts? The answer is, thankfully, no. But what a hell of a laugh line.
By far the most delightful of Miss Witherspoon’s incarnations — and a beautiful testimony to Mitchko’s acting sinews — is when she’s sent back as a dog. I really cannot overpraise Mitchko’s physical approximations of panting, holding a ball, rolling, rubbing, and even tail-wagging. Her shaggy blonde hair shakeswith the panting, and Mitchko comes off with uncanny verisimilitude as a blithe golden retriever.
