Guilt

An opera without music

Scena Theatre’s production of Guilt soars beyond big-emotion melodrama (and without the beauty and power of operatic music) whenever Nanna Ingvarsson (as a cloistered, tough-minded, seemingly sexually-repressed nun) and Danielle Davy (an at-first naïve, fragile young woman cast aside by her own father) appear. Ingvarsson and Davy turn what could have been an over-the-top, time-period specific melodrama into a potent production about women finding their way clear through a maelstrom of spiritual, secular, and personal conflicts. With total abandon, both Ingvarsson and Davy explore the inner worlds of characters who live in a time when women had no agency and were objects to be closeted away. Ingvarsson and Davy portray characters, who each in her own way wants to be loved and touched. But oh, the language Shand provides his characters. Here are some words that had me gasp when spoken by Ingvarsson in her role as a nun. How could there ever be chaste kisses after hearing these words spoken by a voice from God, like Ingvarsson’s?

I could eat his voice, and chew on every word!