Written and directed by Steven Carl McCasland for the first annual Midwinter Madness Short Play Festival, “Blue†is a “fable†about a woman whose fragile marriage was shattered by a girl with blue hair. With the main setting being the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and more specifically, a bench in front of a painting by Jackson Pollock, this banal story takes an unusual direction leading the audience from a personal story to eternal questions about love and happiness.
The good thing is: the play doesn’t complicate the matters. It only shows one woman’s choice that may speak to every one of us and be relevant. Therefore, the performance is interesting to watch and easy to remember.
Dressed in her favorite blue skirt that she used to wear when she was pregnant, Helen (Ellyn Stein), a 40-year-old woman who has recently found out that her husband is unfaithful, heads to the Met and meets another blue-haired girl (Jennifer Spears) on her favorite bench. The two women are different in appearance, way of living and generation, but they are united there by the painting they both enjoy. Listening to Helen’s story, the girl is not annoyed, and she tries to relate to it, confessing, “I’ll leave when I have to.†She even responds to Helen’s experience revealing that she had an abortion, – a situation typical in New York when two strangers do not hesitate to share their life stories with each other knowing that they will, most likely, never meet again.
This love for art that brings Helen together with the blue-haired girl is something that her husband, Richard (John Johmann), could never understand and recognize. He believed that Pollock just spilled some paint over the canvas, and there was no art there, while for Helen it was the whole world. She would come to the Met, sit on that bench studying the work of art and comparing it to her own life. Helen dreamed of becoming a painter, but she got pregnant and had to be married.
Inheriting Helen’s passion for art, her daughter, Marta (Kathleen Moran), becomes a painter and works in a gallery. Her job doesn’t pay a lot, but she is allowed to hang a painting of her own and sell it. Marta is a happy person, but it hurts her to understand that if it wasn’t for her, her mother may have accomplished what she wanted to. Even though Helen objects to this, her daughter knows that having a baby with the man her mother didn’t love was more than challenging. “You are what got me through all this…†Helen stumbles looking for the right word. “Agony,†Marta fills in the gap for her. “It’s ok if this is what you feel.†Helen silently agrees to this, and we see that there is a sad understanding between these two women that brings them closer.
Listening to Marta and Helen, we realize that, on the contrary to a rational idea about quitting an unhappy marriage as soon as it becomes a burden, in reality, people often go for what is known and easy. Instead of becoming a single mother or having an abortion, women often go with a flow, get married with a wealthy man who supports them and doesn’t require them to work. They stay home and forget their dreams. It seems all right until the moment of truth comes: they were never happy, and it is not yet too late to change it.
For Helen, this moment is the day she sees her husband in bed with the blue-haired girl. It is not the fact of cheating that bothers her; it is that she has never been herself trying to save the sinking ship of her marriage. And now is the time for her to correct mistakes she made and start her life from scratch.
Who knows if Helen will get the degree she always wanted, or a job that will earn her a living? The play ends, and the audience is left to make their own conclusions. But seeing “Blue†on stage may be a warning for some, who like Helen, struggle to harvest happiness on infertile soil, and an inspiration for those who are scared to admit that their toil brings no results.
And as the protagonist’s blue skirt serves as a symbol of her coming back to the point when her life stopped, as she starts wearing it again, after many years, and her husband thinks it’s new, the play tells us that we may be blue saying good-bye to the life that is familiar to us, but doing so is an unavoidable part of life that we shouldn’t be scared of.
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