| Jennifer Berry | ||||||
| Writer, Performer, Director | ||||||
| Home | Credits | News | ||||
DENVER — Psychological mysteries in which a protagonists's relentless search for answers leads inexorably to painful self-discovery have been popular since Sophocles' "Oedipus the King," and for a good reason. Audiences admire a tenacious but flawed hero who seeks the truth at all costs. Boulder playwright and University of Colorado theater professor Jennifer Berry's "Permanently Missing," making its world premiere at Denver's Acoma Center, features just such a heroine, but one tailored especially for our time.
Raina LaPage (C. Kelly Leo), a pregnant nightclub singer whose enigmatic husband Peter (David Harms) vanished without a trace three months previously, solicits the assistance of blunt missing persons inspector Ramsey (Will Brown). Ramsey claims to be especially good at tracking down men who leave good women, and he's certainly done his homework. But Raina, whose mind is playing tricks on her, finds herself battered by insistent memories elicited by Ramsey's relentless interrogation.
Berry is especially adept at motivating the frequent flashbacks and then connecting back to the "real time" action, as Raina recalls her first electric meeting with Peter, glimpses his dark side, remembers fateful conversations with her stepfather (Michael Collins) and mother (Patty Mitz Figel), and struggles through a tumultuous five-year marriage. Raina's own checkered past comes back to haunt her as well, and she begins to realize that married people, especially those obsessed with the sensation of love, seldom really know each other at all.
Leo, who specializes in playing tormented young women, is undoubtedly the best actress in the entire Rocky Mountain region to play the role of Raina, and she gives it her all, in carefully measured doses of dawning self-awareness. She fully inhabits the character and makes stunning emotional shifts look effortless.
Harms, an artist, model, and screen actor, is appropriately cast as the rugged and sensitive kind of guy with a dark side that Raina would fall for, and Brown, whose television credits include three seasons as Deputy Floyd on "Murder She Wrote," knows how to make an interview interesting, even if the questions don't always seem to follow a logical progression.
"Permanently Missing," which Berry also directed, is going to go far with small-scale professional theaters. The roles are so juicy, the set is so simple, the conflict is so primal, and the subject matter is so contemporary—particularly in light of the much-publicized disappearance of intern Chandra Levy—the play is sure to strike a chord wherever it is produced.