Theater Review: "Jenny" a search for humanity Sweet at heart though it often is, "The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow" makes you squirm a bit. Rolin Jones' Obie Award-winning, Pulitzer Prize-nominated comedy has an intensity as refreshing as it is bracing.
Jones subtitled the play "An Instant Message With Excitable Music," and the new B Street Theatre production affirms the writer's intended energy.
Director Marianne Savell, though new to B Street, intuitively grasps the nuances of the theater's intimate second stage and smartly paces the deceptively complex story. She also effectively grounds the script's occasionally fantastic notions by keeping the characters' humanity solidly in the foreground.
The idea of humanity is ironic and significant in "Jenny Chow," since the title character is a robot. Jenny has been created by young computer genius Jennifer Marcus (the sizzling Sylvia Kwan) to go out into the world as her alter ego.
Specifically, Jennifer, adopted at birth in China and brought to America, wants Jenny (a charming Mayette Villanueva) to find her birth mother. Jennifer would go herself, but she suffers from acute agoraphobia and can't even leave her house to take out the garbage.
Jennifer's parents take divergent views of her condition, though both are trying to help. David Pierini's stay-at-home dad, Mr. Marcus, has an easygoing, nurturing sensibility, always offering a hand and giving his daughter space.
Carolyn Howarth's mother character, the high-powered business executive Adele, takes a more tough-love, in-your-face approach. Howarth is a subtle, skilled actress well known to those who followed Nevada City's Foothill Theatre Company, where she was both an artistic associate and artistic director.
Here, Howarth keeps the pivotal confrontational role of Adele honest and sympathetic. There is a truly caring yet antagonistic mother-daughter dynamic that Howarth and Kwan dig into – it represents a root of Jones' story.
Since Jennifer communicates mostly by phone and instant messages, she needs accomplices in the outside world. Mainly, she has her high school friend Todd (an excellently understated Joe Styron), who delivers pizza in their Calabasas neighborhood.
Also in Jennifer's world are several characters portrayed by the expert Greg Alexander. His characters, including a sexually curious Mormon missionary and a frustrated fellow scientist, assist Jennifer as she tracks down her birth mother and prepares Jenny for her revelatory journey. The bright, multilayered set was designed by Samantha Reno.
Though there are moments of fantasy and near-farce, an uncompromising, dark drama also unfolds in "Jenny Chow." Villanueva's pleasing Jenny starts off as an imitative machine but becomes heartbreakingly real in her confusion. The antagonism between Jennifer and Adele has a nearly Greek fatalism in the driven performances by Kwan and Howarth.
Director Savell delivers this potent mixture without affectation, and it leaves a real impact.
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