FOUR WOMEN IN RED

The missing and murdered Indigenous women Laura Shamas writes about in Four Women In Red deserve a better play and production than the latest Victory Theatre World Premiere.

The red-garbed Native Americans in question are Lynda (Carolyn Dunn), Jo (Harriette Feliz), Marie (Jehnean Washington), and Sadie (Zoey Reyes), whom we first meet in the waiting room in the County Sheriff’s office where they have gathered in hopes of finding out the latest about their disappeared loved ones (Lynda’s daughter/Jo’s sister and Marie’s niece), or in Sadie’s case, to make a missing persons report about her estranged lesbian partner.

Since this is Sadie’s first time at the sheriff’s office, its up to the more experienced Marie to fill the novice in on what lies ahead:

“They take the report. They file it away. They say we don’t have ‘proper jurisdiction’ on tribal lands. They say we don’t have enough officers to do a good investigation. They say we don’t have enough money. They say maybe she just ran away and lives somewhere else now. They say human trafficking is a global problem.”

Sadie, however, remains undaunted by the Sisyphean task ahead, and over the course of a whopping twenty-five scenes crammed into an eighty-five-minute running time, we follow her journey, and those of Lynda, Jo, and Sadie as they not only return to the sheriff’s office on a regular basis but go out searching on their own while attempting to drum up enough support for a fifty-women ground search of the area around where Sadie’s ex Becky was last seen.

In the meantime, Marie podcasts, Sadie persists, Lynda lends the latter an empathetic ear, and Jo fantasizes that she is Indigenous superhero “M”esko’od Ogichidaakwe, M.O. the Vindicator!”

Will the four women get the local authorities to take them seriously? Will they be able to drum up enough support for their proposed search? Will any of them get the kind of hopeful news they all crave but have little chance of getting?

For the answers to these and other questions, audiences will have to make it through scene change after scene change after scene change in a play that thinks it’s a movie script or else it would realize that jump cuts that are instantaneous on film take a whole lot longer to achieve on stage and in the case of Four Women In Red, probably end up adding anywhere from five to ten minutes to the play’s overall running time.

It doesn’t help that director Jeanette Harrison seems stymied by the material, or that her well-meaning actors are given TV-movie-style dialog to spout, or that audiences might be better served by watching a TV documentary than Shamas’s laudable but ultimately frustrating attempt to make a play out of this.

Finally, it can’t help but be demoralizing to know that the positive changes cited in the play’s emotional prologue seem likely to be quickly undone by the current administration, just one reason why Four Women In Red’s arrival in February of 2025 seems particularly ill-timed.

Production designer Evan Bartoletti does his professional best to make playwright Shamas’s scene change demands doable, and Lorna Bowen’s costumes, Delinda Pushetonequa’s set decoration, Grayson Basina’s lighting, and Joes Medrano Valazquez’s lighting are all first-rate.

Four Women In Red is produced by Maria Gobetti and Bartoletti. Lisa Lokelani Lechuga is associate producer. Ngan Ho-Lemoine is stage manager. Lucy Pollak is publicist.

Admirable as its intentions may be, Four Women In Red seems a likely tough sell for the Victory Theatre, particularly after the spectacular success of Tom Jacobson’s Crevasse, not the least because an issues play ripped from today’s headlines may be the last thing audiences are craving these days. I for one wasn’t all that unhappy when it was over.

The Victory Theatre Center, 3326 West Victory Blvd., Burbank. Through March 23. Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00. Sundays at 4:00.
www.thevictorytheatrecenter.org

–Steven Stanley
February 22, 2025
Photos: Tim Sullens

 

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