All true. It does ask some interesting questions, and my own critique of the play is focused on the playwright's general lack of research, nuance, or plausibility in both his story and his characters.
In the context of summertheater, though, we are talking about the play's politic. The demand for "both sides" tends to mean a narrow range of more-conservative and more-liberal points of view that still fundamentally prop up the status quo, generally from a so-called center that has drifted to the right; in that sense, this play fits squarely into that niche, which may be why summertheater views it as "neutral".
As to your larger point that the play is "about an economically struggling single mother and her daughter facing some hard truths about their previous choices and future options and making hard decisions about where to go from here and now", I fully agree.
But I would offer that when we are presented with a single mother earning a rather robust $80K and struggling to get by in an economically depressed town, we are watching a story of how our larger Capitalist system is failing. And when the story is about how she seeks status by earning more money, the Capitalist system is the one she is trying to game. If the writer had truly followed the difficult questions he raised, we might have gotten into a more interesting discussion about why a middle class salary is considered too little to live on. |
