BRAVA, BRAVA: PLAY BY SOUTHEST STUDENT PREMIERES TONIGHT (THEATRE REVIEW)

The definition of the Italian word bravo and the feminine form brava is "brave, bold, original, wild, savage." Megwyn Sanders' new experimental play, "Nobody's Juliet," is all that and more.

Written and directed by Sanders, a senior theater major at Southeast, "Nobody's Juliet" premieres tonight at 8 at the Rose Theatre. The play, for mature audiences only, continues through Saturday.

Sanders has woven interviews with women, poetry, music and dance into a seamless and mesmerizing production that transcends its parts to reveal poignant and sometimes dismaying truths about the forces that shape women's lives. She has turned the facts of four distinct lives into a single story of Women that affects and engages for an hour and fifteen minutes. The perspective is feminist but never didactic. The revelations are sometimes wrenching but add up to a whole that is cathartically uplifting.

Sitting in a semi-circle embracing the small, purposefully indistinct set on the Rose Theatre stage, the audience sometimes will find themselves leaning into the back of their chairs to defend against waves of anger discharged on stage and sometimes edging forward to help comfort Viola or Sarah or Dawn or even the fiercely independent Brianna.

Each woman's story follows an arc encompassing childhood, dating, and in some cases marriage and divorce to the present.

Men especially may wince from recognizing themselves in the males who have entered and exited these women's lives without understanding them, often leaving them physically or emotionally scarred yet even more desirable. "Everyone wants to come close to the cinnamon of our ears," they know.

Julie Stoverink delivers a powerful performance as Sarah, a woman who has concluded that gay men are born but lesbians are made and has finally realized that she is happy to be one.

Her former lover, Viola (Maeve Roach), is a confused young woman whose uncle molested her when she was a child. She is witchy in the sometimes way of abuse victims, alternately inappropriately flirty and childishly vulnerable and tantrumy.

Roach manages this tricky footing nicely.

Christina Williams as Brianna and Sarah Moore as Dawn play characters less developed than Sarah and Viola. They are more symbolic, Brianna of women who assert they have no need of a man, Dawn of women who feel the opposite.

We may not like it that most of the women in this play feel plundered and misunderstood by men. But we cannot disagree with the poetry of Sanders' telling.