With “Wipeout,” Rivendell Theatre Ensemble offers a production with something I have never seen on stage over the course of roughly 30 years of playgoing: A cast starring a trio of women hovering on the edge of their 70s. That isn’t just a rarity; it’s all but unheard of; seems the farther an actress gets from her ingenue days, the scarcer the roles.
Playwright Aurora Real de Asua swims against that ever-prevailing current in “Wipeout,” which follows three well-into-their-AARP-years women as they embark on a surfing lesson. Directed with humor, grace and impact by Rivendell Artistic Director Tara Mallen, the 90-minute drama running through April 6 offers an understated but rich snapshot of the transcendent triumphs and terrifying trials that come with surviving more than seven decades.
The story is set entirely in the Pacific Ocean, the women on surfboards (solid work by movement director Devon De Mayo) throughout. As the waves curl and break around the surfing novices and their 19-year-old instructor, de Asua takes the audience on a watercolor journey that veers from grim to gleeful, sometimes within the span of the same wave. The history the three women share is parsed out as they grip their boards and bob off Cowell’s Beach along California’s Santa Cruz coastline.
Wynn (Meg Thalken), Claudia (Celeste Williams) and Gary (Cindy Gold) have been friends since at least first grade, but they’ve drifted apart in recent years for reasons that gradually become clear as teenage instructor Blaze (Glenn Obrero) attempts to teach them the way of the waves.
De Asua’s dialogue mimics those waves: Words sometimes overlap, sentences colliding and merging as the women paddle around the beach’s “safety zone” and eventually join the “line-up” (the area where the waves break) where surfers glide roller coaster barrels of roiling blue.
Thalken’s Wynn is acerbic and bitter — three husbands in the rear-view mirror — as she dolefully proclaims she can feel her nose burning into skin cancer before proclaiming that she “hates” the ocean. Thalken makes the source of Wynn’s cantankerousness utterly understandable: It comes in the wake of loss upon loss, the first devastation taking place before she was out of her 20s, the latest driving her to all but cut ties with her lifelong friends.
As Claudia, Williams is softer, her conversation warmed with references to her long career as a teacher, lessons in survival from Malcolm X, and tales of her beloved husband, now in decline.
Gary (short for Margaret) is straight-up pepper and vinegar, a joyously noisy raconteur and the kind of fearless adventurer who grew up without seatbelts and scoffs when Blaze insists the women don their “leashes” — the ankle strap keeps surfboards from flying off during a wipeout.
Gold’s life-of-the-party energy makes Gary’s arc all the more wrenching: Gary’s boisterous verve is all rambunctious comedy, until a single sentence of repeated dialogue — uttered by Gold without the slightest change of inflection — points to a looming, inevitable tragedy surging toward them with the brutal, destructive speed of a rogue wave.
As Blaze, Obrero is a dynamo from his hilariously magnetic surfer-dude-on-overdrive entrance. He creates a moving contrast between Blaze’s gnarly-bro exterior and his gradual revelations about his mother’s illness, his father’s absence and his search for refuge in the water. Obrero delivers one of the most memorable passages in “Wipeout,” as Blaze describes the power of the waves, and how riding them connects surfers to a vast, unseen energy that roils from underwater volcanoes to the tide-making moon.
Throughout, de Asua peppers the dialogue with shards of barbed humor, such as when Wynn caustically states, “When I look at myself, in the mirror, I think: that can’t be true.” Living, she adds with a mix of sardonic comedy and acid-bath rage, requires hanging on for dear life: “And then you get arthritis.”
Projection designer Andres Fiz’s cinematic, oceanic images and Michael Mahlum’s aquatic-tinged lighting combine to create a credible waterworld, the barreling curves of breaking waves mimicked in the arcing minimalism of Caitlyn Girten’s set design.
“Wipeout” wisely doesn’t attempt to solve or even mitigate the daunting sorrows and fears faced by the foursome on stage. But in facing them on the water, Gary, Wynn, Claudia and Blaze show that hope does, indeed, float.
