The Seven Faces of Deborah Staples.

    It should come as no surprise that Robert Hewett, the playwright behind The Blonde, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead, is an actor. His one-woman show contains the kind of transformations actors dream of, and they happen right at center stage. Milwaukee Rep’s Deborah Staples plays seven characters over the course of the play’s eight monologues. And in between most of them, we watch her change before our eyes. A door at center stage opens to reveal a closet/dressing area (the details of each one anticipates the character we’re about to see), and we watch Staples remove and add makeup, change clothes, jewelry and wigs. If you watch closely, you’ll see her body language shift as she works—she’s changing inside as well as outside.
    Watching Staples transform herself is only one of the pleasures of Hewett’s play, which premiered in his native Australia and was a huge hit at Ontario’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival. A La Ronde of suburban intrigue and deception, Redhead features characters from several different aisles of the personality superstore, and Staples has terrific fun disappearing into each one and making them pop onstage. As a young boy, her big eyes are wide with both fear and fascination at the world. Delivering a porch-side chat as an elderly woman speaks, time seems to slow dramatically, just as it should. And as a man, she relishes every “WTF” shrug and captures the essence of his bottle-of-Bud bravado.
    In spite of its intricate craft (the seemingly unrelated characters are tied together with deftly rendered details and story points) Redhead is a rather uneasy balance of comedy and tragedy. With only monologs to reveal the distinctions between characters, he necessarily pushes many of them into caricature. And some of the absurdities of their behavior seem to exist in a different world than central story and character. By the end of the play, you feel like Hewett dropped an Alice Munro character in the middle of a Sopranos episode.
    But Staples still makes it work. For all her onstage transformations from women to man to child, the most remarkable change is not one of age or gender but of time. At the play’s end, we meet the central character several years later, and we see the events of the story register in every gesture and inflection. It’s a testament to Staples’ and director Joe Hanreddy’s knack for getting inside the play and understanding not only what it’s about but also how it works. They allow themselves the occasional broad stroke because they know there’s a payoff of subtlety and depth coming in the end.