Anna Bella Eema is not your typical production in the Baltimore theatre realm.
It's rough around the edges. It promises to be untamed. You might have to open (or expand) your mind when you enter the unassuming Strand Theater.
The show centers around a 10-year-old girl who lives with her mother in a trailer park — theirs is the only trailer in the park, though — when the construction of a new interstate has the police forcing them out of their home.
To face this pressure alone, Anna Bella fashions herself a friend and calls her Anna Bella Eema.
The two go on a journey, which inevitably leads them right back to where they started — that is, they deal with the new species that has entered their habitat and threatened their home.
The text of Lisa D'Amour is poetry.
It tells the audience not to try too hard to decipher what may have happened and what may not have happened, but rather to just consider everything together.
It's heavy, intense language delivered in a narrative style by the three actors on stage for the show, which has no intermission and doesn't offer any performer the chance to take a breather.
It all just adds to the unrefined nature of the production, which is the Baltimore premiere for D'Amour's script.
The three performers are Christen Cromwell, Alix Fenhagen and Arielle Goodman. The show mixes the poetry of the text with beautiful (not to mention very difficult-sounding) a cappella music, and each actor offers a unique voice to blend with the others.
Certainly, a great effort was made by musical director Nola Richardson, who trained at the Peabody Conservatory.
The voices stand alone with the exception of minimal percussion . . . usually a shaker, or a rock beating on the floor.
The pitches aren't always concordant, the percussive metronome is audibly off-beat in the performers' hands and whether this roughness is intentional is beside the point: it doesn't take us out of Anna Bella's world, but actually rather immerses us further in it and its crude, raw atmosphere.
Director Jayme Kilburn wisely pushes the play's tempo from the very beginning.
There's never a moment where the play drags, and, though plenty of words are lost and tripped over by actors racing through lines, the story was rarely impeded.
It was a result of not only clear direction, but also the unified presence of the three actors, who form a true ensemble on the thrust stage, never competing but always working as one.
This is often the result of an artistically brave rehearsal process and persisting selfless collaboration.
The commendable show is not without its caveats.
Go with an open mind, expect anything and look past the dirty veneer, but be prepared for some of the attributes that makes the production so raw.
Actors talk fast, and if you're trying to follow every word you'll probably have trouble; the location of the audience in relation to the stage allows for a lot of sightline troubles, and it is not uncommon to be watching an actor's back for long periods of time (strongly recommended: arrive early, find a good seat in the front).
See ANNA, page B4
The style is narrative, so don't be surprised when an actor looks you square in the eye when she speaks.
Expect that shouting (that common weakness of the untrained actor) will be nearly perpetual, and they'll mostly be shouting over each other straight at your face — but somehow it totally works.
The show's imperfections add to its scraggly, crude aesthetic in all ways but one, though.
The Strand is an intimate theater, a small theater, and the stage is laid out so as to take up quite a bit of the floor space.
And with all the area that was taken, a chaotic and distracting set is strewn about.
With all the little morsels of wildness combining to create an ideal atmosphere, it seems right that the text should carry the rest of the storytelling weight.
But if ever an eye is drawn to some unnecessary little piece of set for Anna Bella Eema, the beholder will invariably have been sucked out of the gritty world of the play, to his sad misfortune.
This is the final weekend of Anna Bella Eema at the Strand Theatre. Tickets are $20 for general admission and $10 for students; Thursday, Oct. 20th, is "school night" — $3 tickets with valid student ID. Thursday, Friday and Saturday shows at 8 p.m. . . . no Sunday matinee.
