The night before he flies to Puerto Vallarta for vacation, Sandra’s beloved friend Ethan tells her something that sounds sad at first, ominous in retrospect.
“I feel like disappearing from my life,” he says. “Part of me just isn’t in the world.”
Three weeks later Ethan has, in fact, disappeared — gone off the grid in Mexico, his cell phone unused. Sandra has few answers in her own life, but she’s determined to find out what happened to Ethan’s.
Playwright David Cale (“Harry Clarke”) writes shape-shifting stories, where self-discovery has a dark edge. Through March 8, Two Crows Theatre stages his 2022 one-woman play “Sandra,” starring Colleen Madden, at Slowpoke Lounge & Cabaret in Spring Green.
The play opens with ethereal piano music, evoking a yoga class near the beach. (Matthew Dean Marsh’s solo piano score is simple and lovely.) Soon after she begins her search, Sandra, a middle-aged woman with a struggling Brooklyn café and a failing marriage, finds herself swept up by a handsome Italian stranger. Luca is not who he appears to be, but to her own surprise, Sandra is not either.
Colleen Madden plays 29 characters in “Sandra,” produced by Two Crows Theatre at Slowpoke Lounge and Cabaret.
Madden, a core company member at nearby American Players Theatre, unfolds the steady unraveling of Sandra’s life as though she’s telling it for the first time. Over 90 minutes, we watch Sandra rediscover herself as a sexual being. We see the scales fall from her eyes in the face of her husband’s casual cruelty, and her dogged pursuit of Ethan’s fate.
“I’m not going to be frightened off,” she says.
As Sandra questions her motives and senses growing danger, Madden’s face cracks open with vulnerability and fear. Her voice lowers to embody Luca’s Italian drawl, then tightens and lifts to channel Sandra’s judgy café manager.
Few performers have the extraordinary skill Madden displays here, the ability to make a performance feel so fully lived in. (Carrie Coon, now on Broadway in “Bug,” is one other.) Watching her feels like close-up magic.
Colleen Madden stars in “Sandra,” produced by Two Crows Theatre Co. Samantha Martinson directs the play by David Cale.
Cale’s play talks like a thriller, as Sandra finds herself embroiled ever deeper. As Madden cycles through more than two dozen characters, Samantha Martinson’s intimate direction pulls a viewer in.
Two Crows Theatre will stage all three of this season’s plays (of which “Sandra” is the second) in Slowpoke Lounge & Cabaret, a pocket-sized stage at the back of a downtown Spring Green bar. Compare the size of the space with the quality of this performance, and it’s like seeing Prince in a church basement.
To step outside this review structure for a moment: To this day, one of the most moving theatrical experiences of my life was watching Colleen Madden in “The Syringa Tree,” a one-woman play set during apartheid in South Africa, at APT in 2010. I remember how that play felt like I remember my first heartbreak.
Here, too, Madden connects so intimately with each character’s inner life. I hesitate to call it chameleon-like, because it’s so much more than surface. It’s the deep work of emotional honesty. See it in “Sandra” before it disappears.
Lindsay Christians is the food and culture editor at the Cap Times. She earned a master’s degree in theater research from UW-Madison and has been a member of the American Theatre Critics/Journalists Association since 2007.
Email story ideas and tips to Lindsay at [email protected].
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