A Life in Crisis in ‘A Woman Without a Name’

Romulus Linney’s “A Woman Without a Name,” at Long Beach’s International City Theatre, is a diary of a mad housewife.

Unlike her counterpart in the 1970 “Diary,” this middle-aged, small-town woman does not take lovers or go to group therapy. Instead, she writes. And in Linney’s play, she speaks, reading excerpts from her journal for the period between March 24, 1900, and May 17, 1901.

During these months, two of her four children die. And she comes to terms with just about every psychological crisis in her crisis-strewn life. Early on, she notes that she cannot lie to her journal, and we’re supposed to believe that its insistence on the truth prods her to probe more deeply into the source of her problems.

The play could serve as an advertisement for the therapeutic value of journal-writing. Or as a feminist manifesto--here is a drowning woman who survives by taking charge of her own life.

But, as a play, this “Woman” has problems that can’t be solved just by writing them down.

Most of the problems aren’t apparent until the second act, when a number of revelations about the woman and her family emerge. These developments are too startling by half; they seem like contrivances that Linney has created in order to give the woman a more exciting interior life.

They might be more credible if we knew the other characters better (and perhaps they’re more fully sketched in Linney’s novel, “Slowly by Thy Hand Unfurled,” from which the play was adapted). But the play belongs exclusively to its heroine. Three of the major characters--her two daughters and her brother--don’t even show up on stage.

The secondary characters who do appear aren’t taken seriously by Linney. The woman’s chief antagonist, her younger son (Bryan Rasmussen), is an irrational hothead; her husband (Richard Voights) exists only to demonstrate how ineffectual a husband can be.

Of course, it’s the woman who isn’t taken seriously in her own context (to the extent that she remains nameless throughout the play; her husband refers to her as “Old Girl”). So it’s only fair that she should dominate her own journal, if not her own play. Yet even her much-touted inability to lie to her journal is open to some doubt.

Near the end of the play, she assumes responsibility for incestuous acts between two of her children on the dubious grounds that she had incestuous fantasies of her own, in her youth. “I am guilty, I am judged, I am free,” she writes/recites. No one could deny that she has been judged, but both her guilt and her freedom are questionable. The chain of transformation in her life seems a little frayed at both ends.

Julianna McCarthy plays the woman with a severe sound and austere look that recalls the woman in “American Gothic.” Director Shashin Desai has understated Linney’s traditional Southern accents, emphasizing the abstract universality of the woman’s condition--although the singing of Protestant hymns, directed by Chuck Estes, places us somewhere in the heart of America. Don Gruber’s handsome wooden set, lit by Paulie Jenkins, is also simple and abstracted, the better to focus on the woman’s odyssey into herself.

Performances are at Long Beach City College, at the corner of Clark and Harvey Way, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 and 7:30 p.m., through June 12. Tickets: $10; (213) 420-4275.