Big Love

“True love has no conditions,” says one character in Charles L. Mee’s exuberant updated adaptation of Aeschylus’ tragedy The Suppliant Women. And when conditions are put on love, there are terrible consequences. Fifty sisters try to avoid marrying their crass American cousins by fleeing Greece for Italy. In Jaclyn Biskup’s Experimental Theatre Chicago production, the setting is an elegant Italy of opera and candelabras, and that formality sometimes translates into dramatic stiffness. But for the most part the cast handles Mee’s absurd situations with lightness and delicacy. Of the three sisters Mee focuses on, Abbey Borkin is especially wonderful as Lydia, the conflicted woman who may love her captor. Sheila Regan is ferocious as the sister who hates men, and Amanda Link has a baby-doll sensuality as the sister who loves them. True love might have no conditions–but in this work it sure is complicated – Jennifer Vanasco, Chicago Reader 6/3/05