DINNER 21: Saturday, January 21, 2006

On Saturday night, Wendy & I went to see Falcon Theater‘s production of KEELY & DU at the Monmouth Theater in Newport Kentucky.

We drove down to Newport a little early to eat at LaRosa’s, a Cincinnati-based Italian restaurant. Wendy enjoyed her JoJo’s Salad — a green salad with diced roma tomatoes, bacon, croutons, and a creamy garlic dressing, and a crock of French Onion Soup. Drew had a green salad (bleu cheese dressing) and a steak hoagie just the way he likes it — mushroom sauce, grilled mushrooms, onions, and cheese.

The show, KEELY & DU, was well-performed. It is a challenging play about abortion and the different perspectives about the issue.

Synopsis: With the Partial Birth Abortion Act fast-tracking its way through Congress and an unabashedly pro-life president aggressively touting ultraconservative judges for the nation’s highest courts, new plays about a woman’s right to an abortion are both timely and necessary. In Jane Martin’s passionate and paranoid thriller Keely & Du, Keely, a pregnant working-class woman in her second trimester, is taken captive by bumbling members of the scurrilous “Christian” organization Operation Retrieval, whose agenda is to forcibly prevent women from aborting their pregnancies by denying them access to the outside world. Du and Walter are her captors, whose actions are all the more infamous as they knowingly force Keely to nurture a fetus which came about through rape. Predictably, Keely and Du develop a porous love-hate relationship, with each tiptoeing toward mutual empathy, challenging the various tactics to change Keely’s mind.