Exploring sex after 60 is sort of verboten in mainstream popular culture, where lovemaking is the sole purview of the young and the beautiful. But senior-citizen sex is a third rail that GableStage, in its latest production “A Round-Heeled Woman,” has ridden all the way to the bank.
The play, based on Jane Juska’s memoir of a 66-year-old woman who purchases a sexually frank personals ad in the New York Review of Books, has been a smash hit at the Coral Gables theater. Another week was added to the play’s run (now through Feb. 6), and additional performance times were added to accommodate the demand. Still, as of this writing, every remaining performance is sold out.
Much of the success can be credited to GableStage’s casting coup in luring a big-name talent to the production:
Television star Sharon Gless, of “Cagney & Lacey,” “Queer as Folk” and “Burn Notice” fame, plays the leading lady, a woman who, after 30 years of sexual inactivity, wants to get a lot of action, with a man she likes, before her 67thbirthday. At turns hilarious and heartbreaking, “A Round-Heeled Woman” is a three-dimensional, fourth-wall shattering masterpiece of depth, warmth and sometimes brutal honesty. In her unorthodox journey of courtship, Gless encounters men who are horny and sensitive, young and old, disgusting and desirable. Along the way, we get to know her back story and the psychological root of her decision, with playwright Jane Prowse using Juska’s story to chart the evolution of the sexual revolution.
Five local actors join Gless onstage, each of them playing multiple parts and comprising a dazzling ensemble of peerless talent. Antonio Amadeo is particularly exceptional as Gless’ estranged son, her youngest potential love interest, a cartoonish dance instructor and a character from a classic book.
That GableStage has already produced what will surely be remembered as one of the best productions in 2011 – and we’re only a month in – is hardly news at this point. That it produced such a resounding hit with a subject as seemingly unsellable as old people having sex? Now that’s a headline.
