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Poster for The Breath of Life

There’s still time to catch The Breath of Life at The Lantern Theater. The play, by masterful British playwright David Hare, is running just through the end of the month.

Hare is one of Britain’s most influential playwrights, and he is famous for his ability to create taught psychological scenarios, as well as women-driven plays and interesting, layered characters. That’s exactly what he does in The Breath of Life, which follows two aging women through a dark night and the following day.

Madeleine, played by acclaimed actress Ceal Phelan, is a near-recluse and retired curator who lives alone on the Isle of Wight and relishes the fact that she barely uses “the muscles that work her mouth” anymore. In a former life she was an impassioned civil rights and women’s lib activist. Frances, lovingly brought to life by Cheryl Williams, is a writer and betrayed wife in search of the secrets her husband kept from her – she hopes to discover them by meeting and talking to Madeleine, the former mistress.

We’re dealing with a sort of twisted love triangle, as the two women, both still hung up on the man from their past, struggle to move on. They start as guarded enemies, but their shared yet divergent paths somehow bring them together. The plot itself is just on the surface, though. The heart of the play is the two women who have achieved a point in their opposite lives at which more is behind them than in front. Their regrets about not being more like each other – or more like their younger selves hoped they would be – are simultaneously heartbreaking and inspiring.

The play is occasionally slow but frequently powerful, and the Lantern’s intimate theater makes the audience feel almost uncomfortably close to the action, as if we’re also actors in the fabulously realistic and meticulously designed living room set. Check out The Breath of Life for a witty and haunting treatise on an increasingly common stage of life.

The Breath of Life
Now through February 28th, 2010

Lantern Theater Company at St. Stephen’s Theater
10th and Ludlow, Philadelphia, PA 19107
(215) 829-0395
www.lanterntheater.org