Getting Drenched at The Drowning Girls

Written for The New West

The pool lining on the stage of The Big Secret Theatre is getting a workout. Signs in the front row issue a warning to playgoers that if they didn’t bring their raincoats, they should be prepared to get a little wet. Three brokenhearted and buoyant brides are coming up for air, and they are inundating the audience with their story.

The Drowning Girls, the last of five Playrites Festival plays, premiered on Saturday night to a sold-out crowd.

The playwrights Beth Graham, Daniela Vlaskalic and Charlie Tomlinson, say “this is [a play] about love: what we do for it; how it makes us feel; how it can deceive and destroy us; and ultimately, how we continue on afterwards.”

Beth Graham wanted to do a play which explored the idea of drowning. “We started with a bathtub and an idea. When we came across the Scotland Yard stories of George Joseph Smith, we were overjoyed.” In the early 1900s he met, married and murdered three women in less than three years. “His technique was crude, his manner unsophisticated, his story transparent. It’s easy to think that we know more about love now, “ say the playwrights, “But ultimately, love is as blind today as it was then.”

So the play forces us to ask the question: What have we really learned? Choices for women were limited in the 1900s. Proper decorum and etiquette dictated many of our choices. There were more rules about what we couldn’t do than what we could. So Margaret, Alice and Bessie can’t exactly be faulted for caving into the pressure of the day, where if you weren’t married by the time you were thirty, you were on the fast track to Spinsterhood. The desperation is palpable. You can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from the women in the audience. Thank God it isn’t like that any more.

So the misled maidens get bamboozled by a professional con artist who takes them for everything they are worth financially, emotionally and ultimately physically. But The Drowning Girls is not a story of victimization; and in my eyes, not even necessarily a story about love; rather it is about solidarity and feminism. It is about an awakening, a reckoning. It is clever, witty and beguiling. These mermaids are no longer choking on their words.

In Greek mythology, drowning is a symbol of transition. More potently, water plays an interesting role in this play. Symbolically, water in literature represents life, cleansing, and rebirth. It is a strong life force, and is often depicted as a living, reasoning energy. This is most definitely the case with The Drowning Girls, who use water almost as a fourth character in the play. Here it is being used as confetti, as a cup of tea; here to cleanse, to calm, to play; here to stifle…

So their voices, until now muffled and suffocated by the man who “took their breath away” are being heard for the first time. The transition from life to death and from victim to hero is fascinating. Open up the floodgates; the drought is over.