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Drowning Girls dives deep into troubled waters

You could soak in the artistry or you could soak in the social realizations of Drowning Girls. One thing this play is not is shallow.
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Lauren Brotman, Sarah Roa and Heather Morrison rehearse a scene for Theatre Northwest’s production of Drowning Girls on Jan. 18.

You could soak in the artistry or you could soak in the social realizations of Drowning Girls. One thing this play is not is shallow.

Theatre NorthWest dives into the lives of three actual women of history - Bessie, Alice and Margaret - who were each murdered by the same man in the years 1912-14. He was their husband. None of them knew of each other, and only through some sharp newspaper reading and the budding use of police forensics was he ever caught for it.

But how many more did he kill? How many other husbands pulled the same stunt of murder for the insurance money, the fiendish deed never detected?

Drowning Girls doesn't attempt to answer those questions, but getting to know Bessie, Alice and Margaret leads us to wonder and fear these things.

The crushing part of the play isn't the violence that ended these women. It was the easiness in the crime. These women had no champions, no protectors, no safeguards. Basic human psychology was used against them, common rules of Victorian/Edwardian engagement were his weapons, simple social walls made hiding his horrors an easy task. Women were so disposable, it was a fluke he was found out at all.

No one was there in those fatal bathrooms but victim and villain when Bessie, Alice and Margaret were each killed by George Joseph Smith (although he used aliases with many of his victims - yes there were others merely robbed or extorted by this charm-thug) so Drowning Girls is written using more universal voices for the three characters, who talk to the audience from the ghostly afterlife.

The script isn't always easy to follow.

The dialogue flashes across time and bounces to sub-characters then back to the main characters like a trolley on rails.

If this were a song, it would be always on key but not in 4-4 time.

We sometimes have to decide if the emotion we are feeling is happiness or revulsion or what.

This is quite on purpose. The writers - three Canadian playwrights worked together to create this theatrical hit - intend for us to be a bit off balance. They want us to think about these women we never knew, and yet, indeed we actually do. We just know them in a different form. They are our sisters and mothers and wives and girlfriends. They are all around us, and are they just as vulnerable as 100 years ago?

TNW nudges our minds to these people almost as soon as we sit down in the theatre chairs. Before the play is started you can see the set, and even down underneath the stage we see the pipes that lead the water to the three bathtubs for the three brides. This is kinky plumbing indeed. The tubes meander and twist in mazes, and that goes on behind the enormous back-splashes as well. We can't see it fully, but it is clearly a serpentine network. We see impossible machinations. We see a deadly snake.

Each of the tubs is given equal position, each of the actors is dressed in white and does most of her action in and around the tub. There is water in each tub (and it is cold, by the way, I checked). There is much splashing. There is chatter and laughter. They each get in and out of each other's tub. Sometimes it's like girls at a slumber party; sometimes it's like watching a slow motion disaster you are powerless to stop.

We, the audience, want so much to stop what we know is a lost cause. The three characters are not people we fall in love with, but we are not indifferent to them. In the hands of actors Lauren Brotman, Sarah Roa and Heather Morrison, we recognize people who were real, who teleported through time like refugees we now want to wrap our warmth around and protect for the rest of their natural lives. Had any of these three acting specialists not given full breath to these characters, it would have hit the audience like a splash of cold water.

Brotman, Roa and Morrison deliver to us a sisterhood - a three-part harmony. Each one is confined to a small space but their lives intertwine and they reach across the spaces between.

There is an audience gap, but also gaps in between the tubs. We are shown those yawning spaces to drive home the cracks Bessie, Alice and Margaret fell through in life. They were gaps chiseled by social propriety, education restrictions, imbalanced career prospects, and simple primal loneliness.

So what, then, has changed? Women still make less money for the same jobs done by a man. Girls and boys are still channeled differently in behaviour training and in career aspirations. Domestic relationships are still rooted in possession.

"She's mine," we say.

We wear each other's jackets or rings to mark our territory.

"Don't look at him, you're my wife," we say.

We still build marriages on the presumptions of "forsaking all others" and "between one man and one woman" and ownership terms like that.

Many have discovered the folly of that, and true fulfillment that exists in partners free to live and love on organic terms. But read a bridal magazine or attend family court sessions and it is abundantly clear that the chains of obligation are still around the necks of modern society.

Wherever human relations are imposed by arbitrary structures and inflexible documents, not free will and unfettered choice, there will be pipelines of abuse, hot and cold power imbalances, and highways of tears.

Drowning girls runs until Feb. 15 at Theatre NorthWest.