Darkness Descending: 'Grey Gardens'

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Camelot is in the air lately, as are memories of JFK and his "perfect" family. So it's appropriate to spare a thought for the Hapsburgs of American royalty: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy's aunt Edith and her daughter Edie, holed up in their Hamptons summer home for 30 years, with only 52 stray cats and "a few rabid raccoons" for company.

"Grey Gardens" became famous as a cult documentary in 1975. In 2006, it was turned into a chamber musical that took home myriad Tony Awards. Studio Theatre hosts the D.C. premiere production, starring Broadway's Barbara Walsh.

Authors Doug Wright, Scott Frankel and Michael Korie have taken what could have been a high-camp gigglefest, filled with drag queen morbidity, and thoughtfully created a musical.

The first act gives us a glimpse of Edie Beale (Jenna Sokolowski, in a nuanced performance) as a young debutante stifled by her mother's (Barbara Walsh) overbearing theatricality. Their Hamptons accents are so spot-on that they're nearly impossible to listen to. Bobby Smith, one of D.C.'s most appealing actors, sparkles sadly as George Gould Strong, Edith's accompanist and erstwhile lover, who speaks in Addison DeWitt-esque one-liners. By the first curtain, the only worry is that Edith is a strident, difficult woman with whom to spend an evening.

In Act 2, the Beale ladies (Walsh as Little Edie and Barbara Broughton as her mother) are shut up in a house together. The place is squalid and dreary, overgrown with plants suggested by Michael Lincoln's lighting design. The plot seems perilously thin after the rapid-fire happenings of Act 1.

Not to say it isn't funny. The dialogue garners plenty of laughter from the audience. But it's discomfiting to laugh at the charm and guile of a mentally ill woman living a miserable life.

Edie was born to power and money, and the only things truly standing in her way were a vengeful mother and an inability to handle adversity. Many a Dickensian orphan has triumphed over worse.

» Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW; through Jan. 4, $49-$69; 202-332-3300. (Dupont Circle)

Photo courtesy Scott Suchman