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 "Let us now praise famous women": Natalie Moore of First Ladies of Ramsey County |
Double
Trouble
First Ladies of Ramsey County
Great American History Theatre
Edith Stein
Frontier Theatre
The novelist J.F. Powers once remarked that the principal attraction of St. Paul was its central location between the prime meridian and the International Date Line. While Powers's evaluation may have been a bit ungenerous, it often seems that St. Paul's locus in the middle of the middle of nowhere is a point of civic pride. This is a city, after all, that clings desperately to a writer who disowned Minnesota when he was still in short pants, and that has as its mythological founder a cave-dwelling bootlegger whose primary claim to immortality was his striking resemblance to a pig. There is little doubt, then, that boosters for the Saintly City will embrace Dana Marie Gillespie's First Ladies of Ramsey County, a play that exists for no reason but to elegize the resourceful pioneers of yore.
From the outset First Ladies wears its good intentions on its sleeve. In a rough-and-ready encampment, designed for the Great American History Theatre by Sasha Thayer, a dainty young thing named Mary (Natalie Moore in deer-in-the-headlights mode) has arrived from relatively civilized St. Louis to meet her husband. Instead she comes across an Indian woman named Old Bets (Sharon M. Day), who is famous in the tiny frontier settlement for her entrepreneurial streak (she begs, steals, and sells) and her uneven temper (she chases a woman around with a hatchet for making fun of a new haircut).
After a bit of wrangling, the two women fall into an easy rapport, and the arc of Gillespie's script is set. Mary, who begins the play dressed like a porcelain doll and ends it barefoot and pregnant, will learn from Old Bets to live in harmony with nature and will become a better person for her troubles. By play's end Minnesota will indeed prove itself to be a snowbound Eden, where winter is the best eight months of the year and where all can live together in sweetness and light.
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From the Archive
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