A Gripping, Gruesome Grey Gardens At Studio

The pleasures of the first half of the show are more superficial ones - director Serge Seiden has convincingly created a fairy-tale existence at Grey Gardens that reveals its cracks little by little as the act progresses. The courtship between Little Edie (Jenna Sokolowski), desperate to escape the dominion of her self-absorbed, bohemian mother, and an ambitious Joe Kennedy (Matthew Stucky, milking that famed accent successfully for laughs) crackles with heat. The retro, meandering melodies of much of the songs come about through the theatrics of Edith (Barbara Walsh) and her live-in gay accompanist George (Bobby Smith, a welcome sardonic presence: "Somewhere in Athens, there is a pedestal missing its statue," he leers at Kennedy). Sokolwski fears the histrionics of dame Edith will destroy her engagement, and she is of course proven right.

It is in the second act in which things transform into tough to watch, but intellectually grabbing territory. Walsh has now taken on the persona of Little Edie, all grown up, and Barbara Broughton (a strangely calming presence, given the circumstances) assumes the role of her now decrepit mother. The formidable Walsh forms an instant rapport with the audience - she's clearly batty, but charmingly and pitiably so. While little actually happens in the second act, it's payment enough watching Walsh inhabit the contradictions of a woman who longs to be free from the squalid life of near servitude to her aging mother, but is the only one holding herself back from a better life. The cranky, codependent relationship between the pair is desperately sad, but a little heartwarming at the same time.

Seiden and set designer Russell Metheny could do a bit more to disgust us with the infamously run-down specter that is the mansion itself. Piles of garbage aside, the set lacks the claustrophobic feel that a health-department-condemned monstrosity would offer. There is a cleverness to representing the 52 cats roaming the presence with actors playing ghosts of the women's past, but the felines still feel conspicuously absent.

The songs of Grey Gardens, with their old school, jazzy feel, can liltingly nudge the plot along ("Mother Darling"), capture a quirky character trait ("Hominy Grits" is one of the most cringe-worthy, yet hilarious, examples of Edith's brash and oblivious racism) or draw parallels between George and Edith's twiddling diddies and real life ("Peas In A Pod, "The Girl Who Has Everything"). In Act Two, the music is more of an atmospheric underscore ("Entering Grey Gardens"). "Will You?" is probably the closest Grey Gardens comes to a break out ballad, and it is repeated at the close of both acts - as the curtains close on ruminations of memories fading and dreams living on, we wonder where this leaves a very resigned, stagnant Edie.

Grey Gardens runs through Jan. 4 at Studio Theater. Tickets are available online.