In 1944, 9-year-old Rhoda (the vaguely autobiographical creation of author Ellen Gilchrist) hates God's guts. She hates the guts of a lot of people and things—the Japanese, her impending period, her older brother Dudley—and, like many little girls in many books, both fears and idolizes her father.

Rhoda is fierce, difficult, and proto-feminist: "she is powerful and she wins." The stories about her childhood (exiled from the boys' games, she "prayed that they would get polio") and petulant teenage years ("she started smoking because there was nothing left to do now but be a writer") take their time: carefully observed, thick with detail and wit.

In the significantly less-interesting second half, Rhoda becomes a drunk, falls for a series of men, ignores her children, says "fuck" a lot, sings "Margaritaville" (ugh), and is generally "bored to death." The bloated, three-hour play glosses over these years (how a gloss can last an hour and a half, I'm not sure) with weird indifference, eventually dissolving into Oprah-style inspirational cliché.

Jane Jones, co-artistic director of Book-It, plays Rhoda from age 9 through age sixtysomething. It's hard to imagine one actress pulling it off, but Jones is small and intense and physically versatile—her childish flounces transition seamlessly into haughty adolescent glides and the perfunctory gait of adulthood.

The glaring age discrepancy is an effective device. When 9-year-old Rhoda declares with certainty that she will never, ever die, and reminds us that "for now, I was soft and violent and almost perfect"—the words aren't really coming from a 9-year-old girl, but from a middle-aged woman. The implication hurts. When Rhoda's age finally catches up with her portrayer's, things get boring and explicit ("I hate getting old"). It makes you nostalgic for those pretty and violent and perfect years. Which, I suppose, is the point.

editor@thestranger.com