Theater review: A prelude to a picnic lingers too long at APT's ‘Creve Coeur’

By Lindsay Christians, The Cap Times, June 26, 2019

Four years after they played overheated sisters at odds in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Cristina Panfilio and Tracy Michelle Arnold return to Tennessee Williams’ saturated south in “A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur,” running through Sept. 26 in American Players’ Touchstone Theatre.

It’s summer in St. Louis, in an “efficiency” apartment where attempts at cheer have gone “brilliantly and disastrously wrong,” as Williams notes in his vivid stage directions. Here, the central trio is three women. Each one wants to make the best of how things have turned out. Each is hoping for a change.

Williams wrote the play in 1978 and set it in the late 1930s, when an unmarried woman a decade-plus past 30 might believably refer to herself as a “girl.”

As the play begins, Bodey (Colleen Madden, aged up in mismatched patterns and gray curls) is frying chicken and cracking boiled eggs for a picnic while Dotty (Panfilio) does her daily calisthenics. Bodey’s trying to set her twin brother up with Dotty, but her roommate is waiting for a call from her not-quite-boyfriend.

“My life must include romance,” Dotty proclaims, sounding not a little like Blanche DuBois. “Without romance in my life, I could no more live than I could without breath.”

Read the full review here!