Posted on Tue, Jul. 08, 2008

Claire Chafee's Why We Have a Body isn't a new play (it premiered at San Francisco's Magic Theatre in 1993), but as the new production by Fort Lauderdale's Sol Theatre Project so amply demonstrates, the laughs it generates are fresh and genuine.

Body is one of Sol's strongest shows in several seasons. It is quirky, funny, poignant, entertaining, provocative. Chafee has much to do with that, of course, but so do director Robert Hooker and most of the cast.

Each of the women in Why We Have a Body is looking for something.

Lili (Erynn Dalton) is a private investigator who specializes in getting the goods on cheating husbands, though in her own life, she's searching for the perfect woman -- a woman who, often as not, turns out to be married to a man. Lili's sister Mary (Ambar Aranaga), who idolizes Joan of Arc and Hamlet's would-be squeeze Ophelia, splits her time between holding up 7-Eleven stores and doing time for the robberies; for Mary, sanity is the elusive Holy Grail.

The sisters' roving mom Eleanor (Phyllis Spear) is applying pseudo-scientific methods -- including an amusing breakdown of the lesbian brain vs. the straight woman's brain -- to her seemingly endless quest for understanding of her own life. And Renee (Monica Garcia), a married paleontologist who is the newest object of Lili's ardor, is trying to follow her deepest desires toward happiness.

Chafee's writing is smart, poetic and insightful. Her storytelling isn't linear, and characters switch between scenes and monologues, yet the play stays riveting. The strong bond Chafee creates between wacky Mary and cool-headed Lili is touching. When Mary confides, ''I've been trying to remember my childhood, and I think I need a better past,'' Lili's smiling response is, ``You have sailed through an armada of therapists, virtually unchanged . . . They should have paid you.''

Hooker, who also designed (with Jeff Holmes) the versatile set, gets terrific performances from three of the four actors. Dalton's Lili is what we'd imagine Sam Spade might be like if he were a beautiful blond lesbian. The erotic heat she generates with Garcia's nervous yet powerfully tempted Renee gives Body its sensual power. Aranaga's Mary is just as bold and nutty -- yet adorably funny -- as the character should be.

Only Spear fails to deliver as Eleanor, though the fault lies in part with Chafee's creation of an earnest, self-absorbed character who chooses to remain at a distance from the others. Spear, however, recites her lines as though she's bludgeoning the audience with them.

Sol's recently inaugurated format is to present one play on Wednesdays and Fridays, another on Thursdays and Saturdays (currently, that's the spot Body occupies). With previews beginning July 23, Matthew Todd's Blowing Whistles (a comedy-with-nudity about the tensions between gay marriage and sexual freedom) joins Chafee's play in rep. We'll see how well Hooker and Sol do with that one, but the predominantly female audience that has been jamming Sol's cozy space would tell you Why We Have a Body is a blast.

Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.