Orcas Actresses Follow the Sun in “Calendar Girls”

— a review by Colleen Stewart, updated at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 14 —

Love the “Calendar Girls” every day of the year, and see them weekends at the Grange! Seated Left to Right: Bev Leyman, Kelly Toombs (the photographer), Lesley Liddle, Melinda Milligan, Holly King Standing: Suzanne Gropper, and Bailey Sande.  Photo courtesy Chris Thomerson

With the last of the season’s sunflowers, The Orcas Actor’s Theatre production of “Calendar Girls” is bursting into bloom, one that will leave your heart swelling and face lifted from laughter. It proclaims the joy of sisterhood and the value of a little debauchery at any stage in life.

The cast pulls off the nuances of cheeky British humor, and even the accents, impressively. The set changes, music, and lighting were so smoothly executed that they incited a round of applause from the audience amidst a transition revealing a stunning painted backdrop of English countryside.

Cut sunflowers line the entrance to the Grange, a motif throughout the play, they are rivaled in radiance only by the cast themselves. The real-life sisterhood and camaraderie developing behind the scenes is utterly tangible as the actresses and actors seem at home in their roles and with each other.

I guess being nude— not naked, their characters insist— in front of a whole small-island audience can have that effect on friendship. The famed nude scenes are coy and comical, parts cleverly covered with bread buns, tea cups, skeins of wool, flower arrangements. Guttural bouts of laughter roar through the audience with each brief reveal.

Six Orcas women of all ages shine as the stars, less prim and proper proponents of what The Women’s Institute was made to be. They snicker at the Institute’s inane presentation on broccoli, and enter store bought cake to a baking contest, drink more vodka than water, toasting to debauchery.

Orcas star Tony Lee, portraying John, the husband whose struggle with leukemia motivates the women, spoke movingly comparing the beauty of his muse— the sunflower—  to that of women in their late stages of life.

“I don’t think there’s anything on this planet that more trumpets life than the sunflower…Not because it looks like the sun but because it follows the sun. During the course of the day, the head tracks the journey of the sun across the sky. A satellite dish for sunshine. Wherever light is, no matter how weak, these flowers will find it. And that’s such an admirable thing. And such a lesson in life.”

In many ways, the putting on of this production required a parallel feat of gusto of the characters themselves. To be vulnerable and nude in front of any size audience gives a spike of fear, adrenalin and apparently empowerment. The embodiment of that boldness by each of the characters is contagious, and leaves the whole room a little more attune to the light.

Calendars are for sale at intermission to benefit the Grange, featuring local cast and crew discretely baring (almost) all for a good cause, just like the women in the play.

Director Doug Bechtel notes that although the tickets for most shows are sold out, there are usually five or six “last minute” seats available to those at the theater before each show, playing Friday, Saturday and Sunday this weekend, Sept. 18-20, and the following weekend on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday Sept. 25-27.