The Dexter Leader
A Heritage Newspaper
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'Growing Pretty' will grow on you
By Sean Dalton, Staff Writer
PUBLISHED: April 10, 2008
Freshman playwright Carey Crim is off to a great start with her Purple Rose Theatre Company writing debut "Growing Pretty," thanks to tailor-made dialogue and a cast of believable actors to pull it off.
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The thing that really stands out about this production and makes it come alive is the quality of the performances, thanks to the fact that everyone on stage has completely bought into what Crim presents in her script.
Lucy Keen, played wonderfully by PRTC professional newcomer Stacie Hadgikosti, is such an interesting lead character, and real, too.
It helps that Hadgikosti is a newer actor and has a freshness to her, since her performance was more raw than that of co-star Grant Krause, who is generally more polished due to the sheer length of his resume.
That rawness lent a great deal of authenticity to the vulnerability and pain that Lucy feels throughout the play.
Michael Brian Ogden also needs to be recognized for his intense and often spastic performance as Lucy's childhood best friend Hami.
His character is best summed up as the ultimate conflicted best friend with romantic ambitions that are constantly at odds with a friendship that is too valuable to chance.
It doesn't help that both Lucy and Hami have a number of crises at home that distract them from each other and push their platonic relationship to the forefront - much to Hami's chagrin.
He is essentially "in the friend zone" when it comes to the love of his life, and Ogden not only gets that across with his great delivery, but facial expressions, body language and the entire kit and caboodle. He conveys pain, frustration and introversion masterfully.
"Growing Pretty" opens with Lucy and Hami taking photos for a Redbook magazine mail-in amateur model competition.
At the start, Lucy is trying to be acknowledged by her mother (played by Rhiannon Ragland) - a task that leads her to seek general acceptance from everyone and Krause's Jack, who at first comes into the Keen household as a boarder, but is quickly driven out of the home and Lucy's life after an incident involving his camera and Lucy's mother.
As always, Krause is great at playing the experienced, worldly anchor to the rest of the cast. He has a penchant for playing a philanderer, which is part of who Jack becomes in the end.
After Redbook editors render their verdict on Lucy's supermodel ambitions, the focus quickly shifts to Jack, and Lucy's childhood infatuation with him.
Lucy seeks out Jack for reasons both personal and professional, but the relationship ends up being extremely volatile and the source of one of the biggest twists in the story.
Let's just say that Lucy and Jack, who become pupil and mentor, are on different trajectories of success and desperation rears its ugly head.
These three relationships take a lot of twists and turns over the course of the story's 18-year span, which sees Lucy grow from age 12 to 30.
Once the kids are out of college and Lucy's true journey to become a photographer like Jack - her love and one of the few people who acknowledge her - the true plot thread begins and doesn't stop making heads and hearts ache until the final scene, where the resolution is dropped in the audience's lap with little warning.
Over the course of the play, Lucy will grow into adulthood and realize her ambition of becoming an artist. Along the way she develops into a more complete human being in general, but whether or not that is the result of her growth into an artist or one of the keys that allowed it to happen is up to the audience's interpretation.
At first it seems like Crim and "Growing Pretty" director Michelle Mountain cast aside the supermodel ambitions and childhood portion of Lucy's life prematurely.
These are mined thoroughly for comedic effect early on, but the production doesn't really hit its stride until Lucy, Hami and Jack grow up (or grow older, in Jack's case).
From there on, it is a very touching, emotional story that had men in the audience at last Saturday's media performance crying during the curtain call.
Hugh Maguire, playing Lucy's father, doesn't get much stage time, but what little he has is touching and his performance during one of two funeral scenes drops an emotional bomb so poignant the resolution of Crim's tale would not be the same without it.
Even though the play is titled and promoted in such a way that one might think it's just for the ladies, Lucy's story is definitely one to which we can all relate.
Whether you've had a childhood friendship that had romantic love at its core but was too valuable to chance, or the strained relationship between Lucy and her mother, there's at least one thing here for everyone to chew on.
Unless, of course, you've led a "charmed life," as Mountain put it.
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