MONSTER CAMP: Summer Sisters’ Sweet Skit

The Summer Sisters in MONSTER CAMP. Photo: Jenn Evans.

There’s this group–a tribe–a porous-bordered cell–of creative female performance artists in Durham who like to get together in the summer and work out their imaginations on a topic. Last year, Summer Sisters took on daughters and mothers with Alzheimer’s, working from Sarah Leavitt’s graphic journal Tangles: My Mother, Alzheimer’s and Me. This year, “gently led” by the fearless broad-thinking actors Rachel Klem and Tamara Kissane, they started with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a way to look at the monsters within and without, and examine the meaning of monstrosity in the psyche and in society. MONSTER CAMP opened at Common Ground Theatre Aug. 28.

The Summer Sisters take their discussions, soul-baring exercises and theatrical experiments as the raw material for their “devised” theatre. In MONSTER CAMP, there are readings, singing, movement, stories, stylized action sequences and one highly dramatic soliloquy (Dierdre Shipman). Each woman wears some version of yoga clothes, remarkable for the jagged red scars stitched here and there. Some of the songs and readings are rounds, with the voices overlapping and circling. In fact, the sense of spiraling deeper informs the entire show. One of the loveliest things about this show is the paradoxical double spiraling–out to the edges of ideas and aloneness, and deeper inward toward acceptance and connection.

But a show it is, with a rather adorable resemblance to skits at camp. There are some bits that don’t work as well as they might, but others that give a jolt of beauty or comprehension. Don’t expect much polish–this work is too fresh to need buffing up. Two more performances remain.

Dierdre Shipman in The Summer Sisters’ MONSTER CAMP. Photo: Jenn Evans.

Fri, Sat, August 29, 30 at 8:00pm
Tickets: $15 (plus tax)-general admission
Reservations: (919) 384-7817
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/803833