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By BONNIE PRICE LOFTON
Rappahannock Ncwi Contributing Writer
If you missed the first two parts of Julie Portman’s touching trilogy about her unusual but endearing family, take heart. The last play My Sister’s Sister, can stand on it own — moving you to sing, chuckle and dab at tears, like her earlier plays did.
You can catch it at 8 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 20 and Saturday, Oct. 21 at Ki Theatre on Gay Street in Washington.
If you saw How Dad Created the World, the scene of six-year-old Ms. Portman practicing her singing scales on the toilet will always tickle you. If you saw Katie Malone, you’ll never forget the love song Ms. Portman sang at the beginning and at the end, encapsuling the story of how her mother ingeniously coped with her father’s suffocating need to control the family. These first installments in Ms. Portman’s Family Album trilogy were so successful, it’s hard to imagine how she could surpass them.
She does. From Dad and Mom, Ms Portman moves to herself and her sister. It’s rich material. It’s the little things of life and the embarrassments of high school. And it’s the big things, reacting to a child killed before your eyes, and going to India to learn a way of dancing that Americans know nothing about.
And, finally, it’s the essence of who we are, explored through her relationship with her schizophrenic sister, Mary Jo. Ms. Portman assumes Mary Jo’s voice and brings her to life, capturing her goodness and her confusion: “I like to mix things up,” says Mary Jo. “Life is really like that. People aren’t dead or alive. They are all mixed up.”
And certainly the Portmans are
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