“THE DROWNING GIRLS,” BY NEW MOON THEATRE COMPANY AT THEATREWORKS ON THE SQUARE THROUGH NOV. 2
No cultural era epitomizes the macabre like the Victorian. From elaborate funerary rites to paranormal obsessions to penny dreadfuls packed with supernatural and/or criminal forces at work, the latter half of the 19th Century might as well be tented in black crepe.
Add to that the Fleet Street press fueling public interest in villains like Jack the Ripper and baby-killer Amelia Dyer along with the detectives who hunted them and it’s no wonder the homicidal con artist George Joseph Smith still makes for a fascinating case study.
His victims weren’t random strangers or people on the fringes of society. They were his wives, three of them, each hastily groomed and gaslit until he could get them right where he wanted them: in a bathtub.
The infamous “Brides of the Bath” murders is the fascinating subject of New Moon Theatre’s latest drama “The Drowning Girls,” running at TheatreWorks on the Square through Nov. 2. The 2008 play by Canadian playwrights Beth Graham, Daniela Vlaskalic, and Charlie Tomlinson blends ghost story and murder mystery, as narrated by dead newlyweds.
A triptych of dirty clawfoot tubs half-filled with water makes for a horror-ready crime scene. To the tune of “Nearer My God to Thee” (which famously played the HMS Titanic into its own watery grave the year of Smith’s first murder), three lost souls emerge and promptly submerge into the grim waters of memory, death and time.
Like half-crazed specters doomed to re-live the past, the women seem equally appalled and amused by their shared fates. In this collective purgatory, they gamely play-act the circumstances leading up to a chilling denoument of domestic violence.
Director Aliza Moran and movement director Katy Stanfield combine the lyrical with the lurid — a true crime story infused with a kind of poetic ownership of the narrative. “I got into the bath,” states a bride, matter-of-factly, of her fatal error.
Actors Nolita Palomar, Kate Peckham and Nichol Pritchard offer performances drenched with cruel irony, not the least of which being that those who share identical misfortunes tend to be stripped of their individuality. Women, especially, are too often reduced to supporting roles in serial killer plot lines. One senses their irritation. Yes, yes: each bride possessed the same qualities Smith (and his aliases) was looking for in a naive mark. They all had some family money, failed to see the red flags, and mistook his control for love. At a time when so-called spinsters faced social and familial pressures for being husbandless, do they receive partial blame for skimping on the background check? These sisters-in-death laugh with rueful hindsight. He was eligible. They were available. Alas.
But the message at the heart of “The Drowning Girls” is eternally timely. Even today, true crime stories about charlatan killers often unintentionally indict the victims. How did they ignore the signs? Were they just gullible? The playwrights give Alice, Bessie and Margaret the final word.
They don’t want our pity, and the script is fiercely unsentimental. Their epitaph is for the audience to write. Here’s one prompt: we’ve all had the experience of getting dressed while still wet from a shower, or maybe had to live in sopping wet clothes after a downpour. It’s not pleasant. But it’s how these actors spend the entire show, only in wedding attire. It seems a poignant metaphor for how womanhood wears the roles demanded of her. The skin crawls with empathy.
Ultimately, the most haunting thing about “The Drowning Girls” is not the sensational manner of their deaths, but the familiarity of their plights: tragic in every era. ✒ C.B.
“The Drowning Girls” continues through Nov. 2 at TheatreWorks on the Square. Details at New Moon Theatre Company.
