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One-woman show does one-night stand
(by Herb Hammer - May 25, 2011)
THEATER, BY HERB HAMMER
One-woman show does one-night stand
Vicki's master plan is to marry young, have two children and finally own a house. We learn about Vicki's plans and the outcome which never quite match through her telephone conversations with best friend Madge.
Mary Faktor's one-woman show, "The Six Ages of Woman," played the Chagrin Valley Little Theatre last Friday night, a presentation of the theater's women's committee. Though only a one-night performance, Miss Faktor will be back in Chagrin Falls shortly as she races around doing one-night stands for organizations throughout the country.
Though her show gets off to a rocky start, it isn't long before you warm to her conversations with Madge and find Miss Faktor to be a very funny lady indeed.
Seated in the center of the set for CVLT's next show, Vicki, played by Miss Faktor, of course, begins her first telephone conversation as a teenager. As the lights go down the first time, she emerges from behind a screen, sits in the same chair and resumes her conversation with Madge. This goes on five more times. As the years go by, Vicki is eventually an elderly woman still talking to Madge, who has traveled to all the enchanting places in the world while she mostly stays home. Surprisingly near the close, Madge reveals her jealousy of Vicki's life.
Miss Faktor created this comedy back in the 1980s and has been revising it ever since. Her phone conversations leave nothing out. Sex and bowling take up much of the show as Vicki shouts, first to her off-stage mother, later to her factory-worker husband and finally to her four children.
Vicki grows from a lower-middle-class housewife to factory manager and her husband's boss. Miss Faktor, who created her hour-and-a-half show, is able to keep her audience laughing most of the way through. If one line doesn't get a laugh, she moves right along until her audience is howling again.
But Miss Faktor makes a couple of mistakes. Rather than playing Vicki, taking her bow and leaving, she spends too much time talking about herself. At the opening, she tells us how she broke out of her humdrum life to become a highly creative woman. When her show is over, she sells books of her poetry. It's somewhat painful to see this funny lady hawking books before she leaves us.
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