{Brooke Bloom as Amanda Blue in Sarah Treem’s A Feminine Ending. photo by Henry DiRocco}

It seems like forever since we closed The Underpants (aaaargh and the accidental jokes continue!!) downstairs in the Studio last fall. We’re ready to bring life and energy back into that little black box of ours with a play that’s a bit more contemplative and a lot more contemporary; A Feminine Ending.

One of my first questions about this play when I learned of it two summers ago at our JAW festival was “what’s up with that title?” It helps to understand that this is the story of a twenty something oboist/composer who happens to be female. Her name is Amanda Blue and she’s one of those brilliant young people (probably not unlike yourself) who everyone expected to go out in the world and BE somebody.

Amanda starts the play off in a conversation with the audience about some little-known gender-related conventions in musical composition and goes on to tell us how gender shouldn’t matter, but really still does, in the process of growing up American in the 21st Century.

{Rock Star on the rise Jack (Peter Katona) proposes to Amanda (Brooke Bloom) in A Feminine Ending. photo by Henry DiRocco}

Much of the cast came up with the Director, Timothy Douglas from South Coast Repertory where this co-production took shape. Peter Katona and Jedadiah Schultz play the two love interests, each with their own comic appeal.

{Amanda (Brooke Bloom) and Billy (Jedadiah Schultz) take a walk in the grove for “old time’s sake” in A Feminine Ending. photo by Henry DiRocco}

Sharonlee McLean returns to the Studio as Amanda’s mother-in-the-midst-of-a-mid-life-crisis and, strangely enough, much of her crisis revolves around another, more modern, pair of underpants. Ken Land makes a strong PCS debut in the role of Amanda’s painfully existentialist father.

{Amanda (Brooke Bloom) presents “exhibit P.” photo by Henry DiRocco}

I have to admit that reading the script for this show was not enough to prepare me for the production. Brooke Bloom, does an incredible job as Amanda of reaching out to each audience member, helping them all step into their own role in the play and letting them choose from among several options; her own conscience, a close friend, her therapist or maybe just a hitchhiker she’s picked up to chat with on a trip from her old home town back to the big city. We never really know how we’ve been invited in, but we’re given a very intimate look at the lives and relationships that touch this very creative and very analytical young woman.

On the surface, the stories of “a rock-star fiancee that Mom and Dad never liked vs. the boy next door that they always did” or “Mom and Dad are actually splitting up after 30 years” are more than interesting enough to fill the time and entertain, but the real experience lies not in being critical of Amanda’s irrationality about this or that circumstance but in letting yourself climb into the head of Amanda Blue and watch from the dashboard as she navigates timespace and eventually embraces a sense of total personal 21st century responsibility.

There are a lot of laughs throughout, but they aren’t the kind of laughs that Steve Martin’s The Underpants with capes, mustaches, whipped cream and hypochondriasis, most recently filled the Studio with. These laughs are a little more reflective. They hit later and linger longer. And by the end of the play you hope there will always be room for a feminine ending and are convinced that once gender doesn’t matter, coming of age (at 25 or 55) will have lost a great deal of its lustre.