
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 25, 1995                   TAG: 9503270031
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: B-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

DESPITE FLAWS, 'GRACE AND GLORIE' IS COMPELLING

Playwright Tom Ziegler's character Grace Stiles in his play "Grace and Glorie," which opened Thursday at Theatre B of Mill Mountain Theatre, is more than the sum of her Appalachian parts. She has a strong faith in God, loves gospel music, knits and makes quilts and has sacrificed herself for her husband and five sons, all of whom have died before her.

But Grace is anything but a cliche, and Barbara Farrar's interpretation of her is both completely comfortable and precise. Her characterization is so definite, so believable, that she achieves what ought to be any actor's ultimate goal: sending the audience away with the character alive in our imaginations, dreaming of how her life (or in this case, death) will go on beyond our observation.

However, Grace is only half of this story. The other half is about Gloria, an abrasive "Yankee" hospice volunteer who comes to help the terminally ill, elderly Grace, who lives alone in a remote Virginia cabin.

And that's half the problem.

Gloria - whom Grace persists in calling Glorie, in honor of a favorite old gospel tune - is written as a cliche. She is a Yankee, in the term's most derisive sense, and she descends on Grace with all the sensitivity of the bulldozers that are out in front of Grace's house, leveling the Stiles' family farm.

Here, Ziegler piles it on: Grace has an MBA from Harvard and once had a brilliant career as a business consultant, an expensive car and a beautiful apartment on the East River in Manhattan. She not only misses New York, she refers to Grace's people as "backwoods rednecks."

As a hospice worker, well, imagine The Hospice Worker From Hell. She offers simplistic wisdom about the stages of dying, demands that Grace think about whether she has wasted her life and forces her to question her faith in God.

And that's just for starters.

A role like this one requires extraordinary expressive ability far beyond what the lines offer. Cheryl Haas easily conveys Gloria's emotional strictures, which, we are to believe, she has developed as a result of several forces: an unappreciative, overbearing, sexist father, the demands of the corporate life and, most important, the death of her young son.

But Haas needs to dig a little deeper to give Gloria humanity and let her develop and unfold in her relationship with Grace, the real crux of the story. It is, doubtless, a tough job, but with just two characters on stage throughout, somebody's got to do it.

"Grace & Glorie" is, nevertheless, a compelling story, and the Mill Mountain production - directed by Jere Lee Hodgin - is pretty consistently engrossing. There is some distracting noise in the staging - the bulldozers doing the dirty work of destroying Grace's homestead. The fact of the bulldozers could be established early on and referred to in most of the subsequent scenes without actually producing the noise. And that would help the actors AND the audience.

"Grace & Glorie" is a somewhat delicate drama that requires a balance of strength between its two principals so that the quiet unfolding of the relationship that defines the end of one of their lives - and the true beginning of the other's - can be given its due.

by CNB