R-S begins its season with Dan O’Brien's The Cherry Sisters Revisited. The play, inspired by the real-life Cherry Sisters, was part of the 34th Humana Festival of New American Plays in 2010. These five Iowa farm girls formed a vaudeville act in the 1890's and eventually became renown. For being completely talentless. Once the Cherry sisters took their show on the road, it gained a reputation for being an absolute train wreck. This propelled the sisters, schadenfreude style, to the Olympia Theatre on Broadway where they were greeted with jeers, catcalls and "truck-garden bouquets" of thrown vegetables.
The Cherry sisters included Effie (Rachel Tibbetts), our narrator and the biggest dreamer of the five, Lizzie (Mollie Amburgey), the pretty one, Addie (Beth Wickenhauser), the witty one who wrote most of the act, Jessie (Ellie Schwetye) the tightly wound but caring mother figure and Ella (Nicole Angeli), the mentally addled one. There's also Pops (B. Weller), the drunken patriarch of the Cherry family who, though found dead at the beginning of the play, makes appearances to insult his daughters throughout. In fact, the opening lines from Effie are, "Do you believe in ghosts? You in the audience? Because you’re looking at one". This line sets an almost eerie tone from the get go, but then quickly plunges into Effie's recollections of her peculiar family.
