[NoHo Arts District, CA] – A NoHo Arts theatre review of the West Coast premiere of Two Elizas, written and performed by Jenny Mercein, part of the Whitefire Theatre’s Solofest 2024.
The best solo shows are personal. They explore ancestry, history, small journeys and epic ones, epiphanies and the tiniest self realisations that blossom into life-changing moments. Two Elizas is really the personification of all that is perfect and true in a solo theatre play.
Jenny Mercein discovered the remarkable story of her ancestor Eliza Mercein Barry years ago. Eliza left her abusive husband in Canada and fled to her family home in New York where, with the support of her parents, she filed for divorce, something unheard of at the time. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which then ruled in her favor. Even though the outcome was a victory for her and set a precedent in this country that a wife was not her husband’s property, it came at a great personal loss, as her son was made to stay with his father in Canada and Eliza was only allowed to keep her daughter.
It’s hard to imagine how women of that time, the mid-eighteenth century, were able to restrain themselves from burning the world to the ground, but I suppose it was how everything was at that time and they were able to manoeuvre their way through it as a matter of survival. It took remarkable warrior women like Eliza Mercein Barry to change things, one battle at a time and Jenny Mercein’s wonderful play should remind us that we still have a lot to lose.
The story is brilliantly dramatised by Jenny Mercein, told as an unfolding narrative as she was discovering it herself in one of the darker times in her own life, struggling with infertility and miscarriages. I suppose she found a renewed strength in the story. A reminder that things were worse for such a long time. Not that we need to be grateful for how far we’ve come exactly. More wary of the mood to turn back the clock…but any way you see it, Mercein and Mercein may just be the most vivid and electrifying timely and time-jumping parallel I’ve ever seen brought to the stage. There is also the graceful addition of an accompanying cello. Another voice, another heart playing fluid, poignant, comical and deeply emotional sounds of joy, bringing this play to another level entirely.
There’s something about theatre that infuses storytelling like this with an indefinable magic. A film is nice of course, but this incredible tale of tragedy, determination, self preservation and self respect just feels right in a theatre somehow, with one wonderful actress and a dark room full of strangers and best friends. For Jenny, it was at times the most heartbreaking of journeys. For Eliza, it was an utterly impossible feat, emotionally, legally and quite literally. She changed everything because she knew no other way to live. Her bravery should fill us all with pride and gratitude and Jenny’s exquisite staging of their connected fates left me beaming with the pride all women feel when a heroine is discovered and made real…bravo Jenny Mercein and thank you, Eliza Mercein Barry.
https://www.jennymercein.com/two-elizas
