Madeline's Mistakes Almost Matter
There isn't an actual character named Madeline in Elizabeth Meriwether's The Mistakes Madeline Made (at Washington Ensemble Theatre through March 16; tickets $10-$18), but one can assume Edna (Elise Hunt), the young protagonist with a penchant for screwing writers and not taking showers, is the one making the mistakes. Michael Place directs this quirky comedy about reconciling one's past and eventually becoming clean.
After only a week on the job as one of 15 assistants to a rich family, Edna already has thoughts of killing her OCD office overseer, Beth (Mary Bliss Mather). Instead, she and uber-oddball co-worker Wilson (Ray Tagavilla) devise a plan that would drive any control freak mad when they hijack the super special Handiwipes that go in the rich kid's snack, which Beth is responsible for procuring each day promptly at 2:35.
Meanwhile, Edna's shell-shocked war-correspondent brother Buddy (Taylor Maxwell), is covered in dirt, squatting in her bathtub, suffering from ablutophobia--the fear of bathing. He won't shower for fear of washing away the sins, so to speak. Buddy is actually dead, but the flashback-like conversations he and Edna have attempt to dig deep into "big issues"--Meriwether is struggling to make a point about stereotypically mundane, banal American lives as Buddy chides Edna for a skit she's working on about date rape, when tens of thousands of innocent children are being killed overseas.
Back in the office, Edna's idiosyncrasies are beginning to cause concern. She's the one actually suffering from ablutophobia and becomes smeared with mud after hugging Buddy during their imaginary heart to heart, and comes in looking disheveled after late night romps with bad poets in attempts to screw the pain of her brother's death away. Wilson provides comic relief while mimicking the sounds of office machinery and being a bit creepy.
Hunt plays the role of sardonic, stunted employee and neurotic, depressed twenty-something well, while Mather has playing a spirited, anal-retentive bitch down to a tee. It's not the cast that lacks in this production--Mistakes scratches the surface of poignant commentary on larger issues, but ultimately it doesn't make them matter.
