Violet: A Stirring Musical
Photo: Glenn Perry. “Alison McCartan and Dan Belnavis in Speakeasy Stage production of Violet.
The 2015-2016 season marks Boston’s SpeakEasy theatre’s twenty-fifth year. To celebrate the event, artistic director Paul Daigneault has brought back the musical Violet, which he first staged in 2000.
Violet is a dramatic and emotional piece, composed by Jeanine Tesori, adapted from Doris Betts’s story “The Ugliest Pilgrim” by the lyricist Brian Crawley. It is somewhat expressionistic in style in that it is achronological, moving back and forth from Violet’s childhood to 1965, the play’s present. As a young girl (Audree Hedequist), was struck in the face with an axe and left disfigured. How disfigured, the audience never learns, since the actress’s face is unmarked. Other characters comment on her scar, but we see no one shun her. Self-conscious, she keeps a lock of hair covering one side of her face much of the time.
Having inherited a little money after her father’s death, the adult Violet (Alison McCarten) takes a Greyhound from the small town of Spruce Pine in North Carolina to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the hope of being miraculously cured by a television evangelist (John F. King). She dreams of looking like the movie stars in the magazines she pores over.