Party Face

Party Face is playing at City Center located at 131 West 55th Street. It runs one hour fifty minutes with one intermission. The play closes on April 8, 2018.

Amanda Bearse is the director. She is known for her role as the neighbor Mary Rhoades D’Arcy on Married…With Children a sitcom show that ran from 1987-1997.

Hayley Mills is known for her role in the movie The Parent Trap (1961). Haley made her off Broadway in 2000 in Suite in Two Keys.

The time is the present and the place “an inspiring suburb of Dublin, Ireland; evening time in Mollie Mae’s brand new kitchen extension”.

Mollie Mae (Gina Costigan) is having a party. She is putting snacks out all around the room. Wine bottles are on the kitchen counter. She tries to cut a block of cheese but can’t because her hand is in a cast.

Carmel (Hayley Mills) her mother arrives earlier than expected. This upsets Mollie Mae. She brought her own yuppie food. Carmel fusses over everything, like the clothes Mollie Mae’s is wearing. She asks if Chloe (Allison Jean White) has arrived. Mollie Mae did not invite her, she doesn’t like her.

Chloe arrives all bubbly, but you get the feeling not that the person she lets on to be.

When Mollie Mae’s sister Maeve (Brenda Meaney) arrives things start to change. Not in a negative way but we learn more about each character. The family thinks Mollie Mae’s husband of sixteen years is away on business but he’s not, he left her. They did not want their kids to know.

The kitchen sink starts to leak. As it gets worse Bernie (Klea Blackhurst) arrives. She calls someone to fix it as she lays on top of the sink with pillows.

Bernie and Mollie Mae met at a mental institute where they stayed for three weeks.

Other information about each character is told. All the pieces fall into place.

Carmel decides she needs something stronger than wine. After she drinks her drink she passes out n the coach.

The cast works well together. The mother from hell, the guest you’d like to slap, the tender but frail party giver, the sister who means well and the very strange guest. They all do a banner job.

This is a well done play about women and their lives. It’s a play worth seeing.

Review by Rozanna Radakovich.

Photos by Annazor.

To read a candid interview with the cast, scroll down to photos. Click on photos for this and other shows.