How can this be – a comedy about domestic violence?  That’s the byline to this 24 year old play and back then maybe it was shocking and maybe it was funny too.  The core issue is still relevant, hell, our eyes these days are much more open when it comes to violence in the home. 

But this play lacks something, possibly because it’s so short, less than 40 minutes.  Possibly because Barbara Woods struggles with the role of Dolores, a woman constantly beaten up by her string of violent husbands, a victim who long ago lost the sympathy of her family and friends because she keeps repeating her mistakes.

Sandra, Dolores’ sister, is a case in point.  Dolores arrives on her sacred Sunday afternoon away from the boyfriend and the kids.  She wants to sing to the radio and relax, enjoy the rare peace and quiet.  As the play progresses we learn that Sandra herself has things she needs to face up to.

In contrast to, and probably accentuating Woods’ rather flat performance, Renée Sheridan is an absolute livewire as Sandra, but tones it down when she needs to without effort.

Women’s Refuge says in the programme that it hopes Dolores will raise awareness about domestic violence, and despite its limitations, the play should get people talking.
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Though it is advertised as a comedy, the very short two-hander Dolores was probably best described by an American critic as ‘a Dramady’. Edward Allen Baker has given his two sisters some funny lines and he establishes a tense, at times humorous, relationship between these two seemingly different working-class women.

Set in a small suburban kitchen somewhere in Rhode Island in 1983, the play starts with Sandra relishing a Sunday on her own, with the kids off in the park with their father. Then her older sister bursts in seeking TLC yet again after her third disaster of a husband has beaten her up.

The comedy between Sandra and Dolores is sharp and funny. When Dolores talks of leaving her abusive husband, Sandra can’t bear the thought of hearing ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ being played at yet another of Dolores’s weddings.

Gradually the comedy fades when Dolores’s plight is revealed as anything but funny as we learn about the lack of support she receives from her family and her overworked and probably not very competent therapist at the local clinic, and her awareness of her dependency on others. However, at the climax the playwright suddenly switches from a believable and affecting drama to clichéd melodrama.

Both Barbara Woods as Dolores and Renee Sheridan as Sandra give clear and precise performances though they were unable to smooth out the abrupt transitions from comedy to drama to melodrama on opening night. Sally Richards has kept the production as well as her design for the realistic setting straightforward and unfussy, except for the puzzling camera tripod and reels of film seen through the open kitchen wall.
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At 35 minutes short, a play can get away with offering little more than a slice of life as lived by some people. Dolores does have dramatic structure, of the peel-things-back-to-discover-what’s-already-so variety. And what is revealed does change the relationship between the two sisters who comprise the cast. But it feels like the first act of a larger drama.

Younger sister Sandra (Renée Sheridan) values her Sundays free of husband Vinnie and their children so resents the arrival of black-eyed Dolores (Barbara Woods), on the run yet again from yet another abusive husband: "Every time I help you out," says Sandra, "it turns into a horror show."

But the pitch and tone of Dolores (the play), according to the publicity, is more sit-com than horror show. This presumably explains the presence of a camera tripod and film cans in the black space beyond the skeletal wall of Sandra’s Rhode Island kitchen, an island in itself of cheerful domestic chaos, designed by director Sally Richards and lit by Paul Tozer.

The start is upbeat, with Sheridan’s Sandra making like a rock star legend in her own kitchen, to Pat Benatar’s ‘Heartbreaker’ which – along with the ghetto blaster, landline telephone, clothes and toys – helps to set it around the early 80s (it premiered in 1985). The arrival of Dolores is the unwelcome intrusion of reality and for a moment it seems we are in for the shouty style of I Love Lucy or Roseanne. But no, as they move from talking at and past each other to hearing and talking with each other, a sense of true sisterhood evolves.

Given the advent of cellphones and so forth – given tand the important role the telephone plays at one point – I suppose it is necessary to keep it set it in the 1980s, even though that makes it less connected to our own lives. Except we do know that domestic violence continues at every level of society and being reminded its timeless does make a point.   

What’s important is that Woods and Sheridan make us believe in the situations Dolores and Sandra find themselves in, and the reasons they can’t extract themselves, provoking much comedy of insight in the process. It turns out they are not so different after all. And because it is heart-warming that some sort of compassion is finally achieved through honesty, the final revelation of what has actually happened between Dolores and Jerry packs a dramatic wollop.

The questions we are left with – given playwright Edward Allen Bakers has written no more acts to work them through – are: Did it really have to go that far? How will the law judge what has happened? Is this the sort of problem such people bring upon themselves, inevitably, or is it the self-centred insularity of those around them – of us – which makes such outcomes inevitable?

I guess the final act is designed to play out in our minds, conversations and actions. That’s not a bad outcome for what is essentially a well-crafted writing, acting, directing and design exercise.

PS:  I’m sure I saw a homegrown play at Bats a few years ago that also involved a woman subjected to domestic violence seeking refuge with her reluctant sister, in a remote setting involving lots of rain, I think. Can anyone tell me the name of that play? – JS
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