Colleen Werthmann, Zoë Geltman, Meghan Emery Gaffney, and Paul Ketchum in Kara & Emma & Barbara & Miranda. Photo: Stephen Simalchik

Ariel Stess begins the script of Kara & Emma & Barbara & Miranda with a series of quotes by women writers about self-erasure and self-repression, one of them by Mary Gaitskill: “With other women who he had been with in similar situations, he had experienced a relaxing sense of emptiness within them that had made it easy for him to get inside them and, once there, smear himself all over their innermost territory until it was no longer theirs but his.” Kara and Emma and Barbara and Miranda live very different lives, in very different age brackets and class fragments of Santa Fe, but they’re all struggling to overcome this emptiness. They’re trying to tell us stories that express their true selves and acknowledge needs that aren’t being seen–needs that sometimes they can barely see for themselves–and to take that innermost territory back, not just from the men in their lives but from the demands of a capitalist society and from their own willingness to suppress themselves. Over the course of the six months that the play traverses, each starts to build a stronger foundation for a self that’s acting rather than reacting, a self that sets boundaries, a self that’s able to look forward. Director Meghan Finn brings each of the four main actors on a tricky emotional journey with openheartedness and simplicity; the play ends not with resolution but with glimmers of hope that feels earned: hope in empathy, hope in self-compassion, hope in self-care, and even hope in providential financial rescue. 

Kara (Meghan Emery Gaffney) is a wealthy forty-ish mother of two, living in a dream home that she and her husband have built in the mountains, but since she’s come back from three months away caring for her dying mother, she feels like her family has re-formed itself without her. She’s used to being effortlessly competent, but grief has hollowed her, and in Gaffney’s performance, we see not just the grief but Kara’s awareness that her husband, Dennis (Paul Ketchum, who plays all the male roles here with an equally impassive emotional dullness), is utterly oblivious to what she’s going through.

Emma (Kallan Dana) is their nanny, twenty-one but seeming younger due to her unsteady sense of self. Once ambitious, she now seems directionless, moving back in with her mother to save money for a future that feels ever more elusive. She may live with Barbara but there’s no sense of closeness there; they move through their shared house as barely companionable roommates, judging each other’s choices. She doesn’t really know how to fit anything she cares about into the shape of her life; a relationship with a married man isn’t really bringing her joy but she’s trying so damn hard to believe it’s enough. Dana brings a restlessness to Emma, a yearning that expresses itself in pressured speech and never really knowing how to settle in her body.  

Barbara (Colleen Werthmann), in her mid-fifties, has built a functional if not fulfilling life as a waitress at a cafe owned by Kara and her husband, Dennis; she’s trying to rebuild her center after a series of failed relationships, but she doesn’t feel like she has the inner resources to be a useful parent, let alone someone who can guide Emma to a better future. Werthmann’s brassy salt-of-the-earth bluntness is often very funny, but still allows us to glimpse the struggle within, the desire to be in control of her own life and her own surroundings. For me, her story becomes the most emotionally wrenching, as Barbara stirs herself to dramatic action on behalf of her daughter–whom she’ll freely admit she never really understood–even as she’s battling to find herself. “How did I train myself to never be at ease and still lead the world to believe I’m okay?” Barbara asks. 

And thirty-something Miranda (Zoë Geltman) is barely living paycheck to paycheck at a retail job, never able to cover food, rent, and cellphone at the same time, and not getting a lot of support from the boyfriend who’s theoretically her partner in all of this. Miranda, an outsider to the relationship dynamics of the other three, gets many of the funniest lines, and Geltman revels in Miranda’s sharp observations and keen self-knowledge, but also brings world-weariness and a certain fear at her own ability to compromise out of desperation. 

While from the outset, Kara’s and Emma’s and Barbara’s lives intersect at key junctures, Miranda, a salesperson at REI, is the outlier–and also living the least stable life, financially and emotionally. But her life crosses with Dennis’s at a critical moment, a connection that, six months later, will bring her into the orbit of the other three as well, and force her to balance the well-being of a stranger against her own. Between June and Christmas of 2008, all four are having some pretty terrible times. The shadow of the global financial crisis hangs over the piece, not always explicitly, but underscoring the way that emotional precarity goes hand in hand with financial precarity: three of the four are struggling monetarily in different ways. (The exception being Kara, with a trust fund and an inheritance.) Dennis leaves Kara for Emma at the top of the play. Emma and Dennis run away together, but not in a purposeful way; they wind up in Aspen and it seems like most of their time together is spent with him being judgmental of her inability to make life choices beyond being with him. Barbara thinks she’s finally gotten rid of her ex, Matt, until he breaks into her house in the middle of the night. And Miranda’s constant struggle to wrangle the obligations in her life finally fails completely on the night before Christmas Eve, when her pipes freeze and flood her apartment–just after she’s spent the bulk of the money in her account on food that’s about to go bad in their powerless fridge. 

Stess builds the play almost entirely out of present-tense monologues; the snippets of dialogue that do occur are embedded in those monologues, framed by “he says” in the narrative and firmly remaining inside the storytelling consciousness of one of the four. By contrast, the men in their lives—different spins on unreliable mansplainers, their similarity increased by Ketchum’s intentional affect of mild smarm–are completely lacking in interiority. From Dennis to Miranda’s boyfriend, Doug, and coworker George to Barbara’s sometime fuckbuddy Matt, the men are defined by the way the women see them–which involves a lot of coming to terms with their own long-swallowed anger, their long-standing habits of repressing their own needs and wants. We don’t ever really know why any of these couples are together, Emma and Dennis in particular; he belittles and dismisses her. Doug seems useless, George smug, Matt both fragile and selfish. 

Yet for most of the play, outside of a quick scene between Barbara and Emma, we only see the women in relation to these men. In Dennis’s car as they drive back to Santa Fe unannounced for him to see his kids on Christmas Eve, Emma starts talking about a paper she wrote in high school on the Bechdel test: “If society trains women and teens to see themselves and all their assets and their entire set of circumstances, physical, career, familial, whatever, through men’s eyes, through the um, the patriarchal lens, then WHY would women truly have anything else to discuss when they’re together OTHER THAN MEN?…That TEST just like punishes girls and women for talking all the time about the thing that oppresses them, baffles them, and SUFFOCATES them.” Stess thoroughly inverts the lens here–and we’re so hungry to see the women come together by the end and turn that lens on one another that even the supreme awkwardness of that encounter feels like an abundance of grace.

By building the monologues as narrative rather than interior soliloquies, Stess allows the play’s action and location to be vividly imagined by the audience without giving us much more onstage than a wall/platform combo (orange to perhaps lightly reflect the adobe of the New Mexico setting, with projections, by Pete Betcher, to transition from location to location). The novelistic quality to Kara & Emma & Barbara & Miranda gives the play its structural strength and gives the four characters the chance to fully control how we perceive their stories, but it can also blunt emotional nuance. The women are constantly describing their own emotions as much as they’re experiencing them–accurate, for these alienated, striving characters, and also speaking to their emotional distance from the men in their lives, and from one another, when they finally meet. Still, sometimes this starts to feel like a tic of technique, giving a sameness to the very different stories they’re telling, in particular the dialogue tags after each line of a conversation. Finn and the actors deftly follow the script’s lead to shift almost imperceptibly between monologue and dialogue–between addressing the audience and addressing the other characters–but we can never forget for an instant that we’re being told a story rather than watching it unfold. The technique also lends the characters a kind of preternatural self-awareness, which can sit uneasily against their inability to actually express these thoughts and insights to the people around them. By the end, they’re all taking steps to move forward with their lives–and in a few shining moments, we see them come so close to sharing emotional truths with one another–but we never see them put down that self-narration and deeply engage with each other. The disappointment of that is, in the end, part of the point.