‘South Division’ explores miracle family
With their particular inherited traditions and actually lived histories, every family is unique and most think themselves special. But very few families can trot out a visit from the Virgin Mary in describing what sets them apart.
Cue the polka music for Buffalo’s Polish-American Nowak clan, who we meet in Tom Dudzick’s sentimental and nostalgic “Miracle on South Division Street,” Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s disappointing entry in the holiday theater sweepstakes.
It opened Friday night, under C. Michael Wright’s direction.
Like Dudzick’s equally cloying “Greetings,” which has been performed several times in Milwaukee, “Miracle” is set on Christmas Eve; as is also true with “Greetings,” one of its plot points involves a Catholic son who – oy vey! – is dating someone Jewish.
But most of the time spent in Clara Nowak’s kitchen during this 90-minute, intermission-free play revolves around a longstanding Nowak legend that the Virgin Mary once visited Clara’s immigrant father, who responded by commissioning a commemorative statue that’s become a shrine, drawing a dribble of faithful hoping to be healed.
Clara (Raeleen McMillion) has believed in this miraculous story all her life; one might think of her abject devotion to its tenets as a symbol of her equally dogmatic, rule-bound Catholicism.
Until we reach an unconvincing, awkwardly sutured epilogue that improbably suggests she’s a different and infinitely more tolerant person, we’ve known Clara as an ignorant caricature who — in a play set in 2010 — believes that missing Mass means hellfire, marrying someone Jewish is unthinkable and a “monologue” is a puppet show.
For all the relentless, not-so-funny sitcom in Dudzick’s script, it’s clear that Clara’s arrested development has taken a toll on her three adult kids and this family, which doesn’t actually seem all that warm and loving.
Beverly (an appropriately abrasive Greta Wohlrabe) is a junior, one-note Clara and even more intolerant. Young Jimmy (a likable Josh Krause) struggles to assert himself; he just wants to get along.
That leaves Ruth (Kat Wodtke), the awkward and sensitive middle child, to shake things up by calling a family meeting, where she’ll share a deathbed confession that’s put her in possession of the real story involving the statue.
Improbable as this clunky reveal may be, it underscores what Ruth has been trying to tell her family for a long time: A family’s traditions are most useful when they help living family members make sense of who they and their loved ones actually are.
One sees this most fully in the relationship between Clara and Ruth; it’s a credit to McMillion and Wodtke that they convey as much as they do.
There are tantalizing moments when they transcend the limitations imposed by Dudzick’s creaky script, joining Clara and Ruth in writing a more interesting story than the one whose lines they’ve inherited.
“Miracle on South Division Street” continues through Dec. 17 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre, 158 N. Broadway. For tickets, visit milwaukeechambertheatre.com. Read more about this production at Tap Milwaukee.com.