Blue Virgins

Published 7:00 pm Saturday, September 8, 2007

You can’t really miss with a comedy that features chainsaw-carved Madonnas.

With his new play “Blue Virgins,” local playwright Tom Churchill said the idea for the play came to him serendipitously 20 years ago.

While teaching some years back at the University of Wisconsin in Greenbay, Churchill said he was fascinated by a bevy of garden bathtub grottoes in which were statues of the Virgin Mary, lovingly placed like little altars meant to bless the flowers and passing motorists.

Out of this memorable image came “Blue Virgins,” which opens Friday, Sept. 14 at Whidbey Children’s Theater and runs through Sept. 23.

“Who in the hell might sell those things, say, if he carved them from wood and had also the franchise on old bathtubs that he cleverly saws in two?” Churchill wonders in his director’s notes on the play.

“I was aware then of certain Midwest oddities which were amusing to me,” Churchill said. “Years later, the play just poured out of me in about three weeks of writing.”

First staged as a one-act play at Seattle’s Freehold Theatre Lab in 2006, the play won an award for best new play.

Churchill describes the piece as a romantic comedy with comtemplations on love, religion and national healthcare.

In a nutshell, the story revolves around the experiences of Darien Ramsey, played by Brian Plebanek, a successful corporate salesman who gets fired for ostensibly drinking on the job. He then revives the chainsaw carving hobby he had in his youth.

The play’s triplet-form takes Darien to three different farmhouses where three wives remain alone while their hunting husbands are away for the deer season.

Darien, selling his hand-carved blue Madonnas (in reality carved by the skilled hand of local wood artist Pat McVay) finds the classic salesman approach is not what works this time around. He is forced to find a human quality in himself that he previously had not tapped, and it provides him with a solace that had been absent to him.

“He becomes almost like a ‘secular priest’ and the women respond to him in a kind of confessional way,” Churchill said.

Gail Liston plays the part of Winnie, one of the temporarily abandoned wives.

“Darien drops in on these three lonely women and somehow manages to give them what they’ve been yearning for,” Liston said.

Indeed, Churchill knows a thing or two about what women need.

In the course of the play not only is there the theme of a man healing the love relationships of these disheartened couples but there also happens to be a male striptease by another character for the viewing pleasure of the audience. And to forward the story line, no doubt.

“One thing I really love about plays is that it gives me the opportunity to work on things that are totally different in tone and genre,” Churchill said.

“I love this play because there is a strange theological discussion that builds in it,” he said. “And yet it’s not too deep; it’s still a comic romance, but eventually we take it pretty far.”

Churchill has produced three other plays in Langley, at Whidbey Island Center for the Arts and at Bayview Hall.

“Blue Angelica,” a takeoff on the movie classics “The Blue Angel” combined with “Doctor Faustus”; and “Lillian in Limbo,” based on the life of Barnum and Bailey aerialist Lillian Leitzel, who died of a fall in the 1930s.

The third, “A String of Pearls,” focuses on the friendship between an American daughter of the commanding general on duty during the raid of Pearl Harbor and her Japanese-American friend who reunite after years apart when they plan a trip to ground zero in Hiroshima.

Churchill is also a published novelist, a poet and an actor. But it seems it is the form of playwrighting that excites him the most.

“There are some places that a play can take a piece of information and make it dramatic; it’s privately moving,” Churchill said.

“And this play makes me laugh.”

“Blue Virgins” runs at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday Sept. 14, 15, 21 and 22 and at 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 16 and 23.

Parental guidance is suggested due to some mature content.

Tickets are $10 for general seating and are available at Vino Amore in Freeland, Violet Fields in Langley and at the WCT ticket window before the show. The show is 90 minutes long with one intermission.

A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Friends of Friends Medical Support Fund.