Thanks to a certain Netflix series, a lot of attention’s been paid lately to women in prison. Now comes a new play about women who’ve met behind bars, complete with flashbacks.
That’s about all off-Broadway’s “And I and Silence” has in common with “Orange Is the New Black.”
Set in the 1950s, Naomi Wallace’s drama toggles back and forth between 17-year-old inmates Dee (Emily Skeggs) and Jamie (Trae Harris), and the same characters nine years later (played by Samantha Soule and Rachel Nicks, respectively) — out of prison but still not free.
The young girls strike a prickly friendship, slowly winning each other’s trust as they look beyond their differences — Dee’s white, Jamie’s black. As the story moves forward and backward in time, we see the contrast between the teenagers, locked up but full of hope, and the women, stuck in an increasingly bleak situation as they struggle to find work as servants.
Wallace goes for the stylized and poetic rather than the gritty and realistic — not for nothing has she lifted her title from an Emily Dickinson poem. Director Caitlin McLeod’s staging and Rachel Hauck’s grim set of rusty pipes and a single bed suggest a self-contained world without any escape hatch: “There’s no place for us,” Dee tells Jamie. “The streets don’t want us.”
But the dramatic tension is as slack as the language is potent. The show feels meandering and its shock ending veers into eyebrow-raising melodrama.
Too bad, because “And I and Silence” has powerful things to say about how the world at large — more than just prison bars — can keep women down.