‘Cups’ tells a funny, touching story through bras
A woman’s journey from girlhood to maturity is told through stories about her bras.
BY CHRISTINE DOLEN
CDOLEN@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Actress Gwynyth Walsh performs the solo show 'Cups,' a funny and poignant play involving the different bras in a woman's life.
Where: Aventura Arts & Cultural Center, 3385 NE 188th St., Aventura
When: 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, through Oct. 22
Cost: $36 (breast-cancer survivors can get one free ticket by using the password PINK when reserving)
Info: 954-462-0222, www.aventuracenter.org
At first glance, the idea might seem a little odd: the story of one woman’s life told through anecdotes about the various bras she’s worn.
But think about the success of such woman-resonant shows as Menopause the Musical and Motherhood the Musical, and Joni Sheram’s Cups sounds like a good bet to tap into those everywoman experiences that make girl-power theater so popular and virtually critic-proof.
Cups, a solo show performed by actress Gwynyth Walsh at the Aventura Arts & Cultural Center, is simpler than those brassy and beloved musicals. Though Sheram’s play would never be confused with a Tony Award contender, it is funny, contemplative and ultimately touching. And there’s a reason the show is visiting South Florida during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Sheram, who died nearly a year ago after a long battle with cancer, wrote and performed Cups as a tribute to her mother and grandmother, creating a fictional woman named Nora but blending in her own experiences – and those of any girl or woman who has ever worn a bra. Guys who score above-average in the empathy department can certainly enjoy the show, but to really get it, you probably need to have been stabbed in the armpit by an underwire that has escaped its fabric casing. Just saying.
Walsh, a Canadian actress with a long list of movie and television credits, is a slender, energetic and engaging Nora. The conceit of the show is that she has gone up to her attic to stow away a bra worn by her beloved, recently deceased mom . She begins reminiscing, with decades-traversing photos projected on a large screen behind her, as she pulls from drawers and boxes the bras that have marked her own passage from anxious seventh grader to empty nester who has lost a breast but found mature love.
By turns, Walsh becomes the insecure junior-high Nora, Nora’s mom, underwear saleswomen and more. As happens often in one-character plays, she gets phone calls (even the phones, particularly a pink Princess model, mark changing eras) so that she isn’t always talking directly to the audience.
She sounds like a lively professor delivering a lecture when she breaks the fourth wall to get some back-and-forth going with the smiling, nodding gals who remember their own bra-by-bra history. Like Nora, they’ve been there, worn that.
The Cups timeline doesn’t quite track for Walsh, who is clearly younger than Nora, but the story she tells – about an insecure girl who becomes a young mother, a woman betrayed, a cancer survivor – makes for a play that digs deeper than a mere catalogue of evolving bra styles.
