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The Divine Sister's comic convent at SpeakEasy Stage

Theater

Simple pleasures

The play begins to the tune of English rain, with Diane Prusha’s slightly dotty, sensibly shod Lotty telling (for the first time) the book’s story of a man who plants his walking stick on a new property to mark the place where he intends to plant an acacia, then returning in spring to find that the stick itself has taken root and sprouted — and that is it indeed an acacia. The play is a similar fable, in which emotional dead wood blooms in spite of itself. The charming story, however, is slow getting off the ground, with act one taking the form of nine short scenes during which the meek but unstoppable Lotty, inspired by a newspaper ad for the Italian castle to let (and by her own prescient visions), bulldozes Ladies’ Club acquaintance Rose Arnott into signing on, then rounds up languid flapper Lady Caroline Bramble and dictatorial widow Mrs. Graves to complete the party. And, of course, we meet the husbands who are making Lotty and Rose unhappy: condescending lawyer Mellersh Wilton and party boy Frederick Arnott, who distresses his religious wife by writing salacious biographies under a pen name. Although well sketched and amusing, the act seems fragmented and the English dreariness in which it unfolds all too real.

Act two brings not only warmth but cohesiveness to the material — along with combustible Italian retainer Costanza, played by Rachel Siegel as an oddly young and blonde but credibly unilingual spitfire who is also a comfort. Each of the women at San Salvatore Castle is nursing a heartache, Rose for her errant husband and the loss of a child, Lotty for her disappointing marriage, Lady Caroline (as she graciously permits herself to be called, omitting her sir name but not her title) for a love whose loss no amount of gin, jazz, and modernity can assuage, and the literarily connected Mrs. Graves for the less ossified life her rigidity has kept her from living. (Barber changes the names of some of Arnim’s characters.) But eventually all are pulled into the maelstrom of Lotty’s ditzy determination to kiss “before” goodbye and forge an “after” into which to plunge headlong. And this being 1922, when women were arguably defined by men, the guys, including the jovial castle owner to charm Mrs. Graves and rekindle Lady Caroline, must show up to smell the sun, sex, and flora.