Actors Theater Showcases Orcas Playwrights in “Familiar Distance”

 — by Margie Doyle —

Orcas playwrights Michele Griskey, Lin McNulty and James Wolf have created landscapes of home in three complex, provocative plays, collectively titled, “Familiar Distance.” The plays are produced by Lin McNulty and directed by Lynda Sanders, Lin McNulty and Robert Hall.

On opening night, seven Orcas actors rendered those scenes movingly. In “Lilacs,” by Michele Griskey,  the exchanges between Suzanne Gropper as the family’s black sheep ghost and Vanessa Moriarity as a scared, threatened young lover are semi-comic, semi-sinister. Kevin Doyle’s voice enters their hideaway to pierce the safety of home with the questions of love and life  —  does “love have a way of taking your freedom” as Moriarity’s character says? Griskey posits that although some things change over time, the important things — to respect your own heart — remain the same.

“I Used to Live Here,” the work of James Wolf, turns the “stalker” scene inside out, as Kelly Toombs portrays a traveler who returns to his childhood home. Emmy Gran is the current occupant, and her paranoia and agoraphobia follow her as she follows him around the home with a knife. Their visit develops into an examination of what makes us leave home, and what makes us return.

Lin McNulty’s “Safe and Warm” is a treatise on the negotiations we all make with life and the desire, after all our adventures, to be safe and warm — whether in a place or simply in another person’s company. Gillian Smith is the worn-down, mistrustful, abandoned wife, and Freddy Hinkle plays the rebel who’s lost his cause and now wants one last adventure on his own terms.

The actors captured the soul of the plays and mastered the dense drive of the scripts impressively. “Familiar Distance” shines a spotlight on the perception and craft of insightful, vibrant observers of life and home. As Robert Frost wrote, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.”