Last Summer at Bluefish Cove - Jane Chambers [February/06]

I skipped over this when I was doing up this month, so I read it earlier in the month, but close enough. This was a play written by a female playwright. It is really a simple play, but it does have a few messages for its readers. At the beginning of the play we are introduced to a woman fishing at Bluefish Cove, a beach resort. She is just there, it is nothing special, but that is the opening scene. Another woman enters the scene, she has just terminated her marriage and was looking for somewhere, anywhere, to go. She just drove and Bluefish Cove is where she ended up. It is this brief interaction between these two women that shows just how different they are. For starters, the woman fishing is a lesbian, while the other woman is so naive she does not pick up on it. She is from an upper class and likely has lived a very sheltered life. She has never even had to work before. What she finds out by attending a Bluefish Cove party is that she is the only "straight" woman in the area, only lesbians rent out Bluefish Cove. She had been worried she would be out of place with all the women and men, but instead she was out of place in the fact that she did not know.

This play seems to be about informing. There is a stigma surrounding woman that have relations with the same sex and many people think of them as different. In the play, though, Chambers shows the woman as like anyone else. They have bad relationships, they cook, they drink, they fish, just a regular lifestyle. It would appear that Chambers is trying to say: "look at us, we are basically just like everyone else, we just have a different sexual preference". In the play you still see women hiding from who they really are. One of the women in the play is an author of feminist books and was previously a doctor. She is terrifed that someone might find out that she is a lesbian, and it takes her friend (the fisher) having cancer to slowly come to terms with who she really is. There are no actual male characters in the play, but they have a presence nonetheless. The men are the ones that took everything because their wife left them for another woman, one of the women in the play is even paying her lovers children's way through university because of the ex-husbands hurt pride. It is really a very interesting play with interesting characters and a message to others to not judge lesbians so harshly.

3.5/5