Training stranger muscles Theatrical exercise from the Deviant/goods BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	Flo and Glo By Katie McKee. Directed by Stephen McLaughlin. With Tavia Lin Gilbert and Jamalieh Haley. Produced by the Deviant/goods at A Company of Girls, through March 27. Call (207-409) 6763.
	Backstage • This year, celebrate being Irish with not just Jameson’s, but melodrama! On March 17 and 20, the American Irish Repertory Ensemble offers staged readings of The Colleen Bawn, a 19-century play that features live Irish tunes, a sweet Kerry lass, and a villainous lawyer. Call (207) 799-5327. • The 2004 Presidential election is now behind us, but a lot of folks still have a thing or two they’d like to say about it to Ohio. Several of them — including the Phoenix’s own Sam Pfeifle and Caitlin Shetterly — will sing, read, recite, and otherwise perform those sentiments at the St. Lawrence this Monday, March 21, in the Winter Harbor Theatre Company’s production of Letters to Ohio. Call (207) 775-3174.

Flo and Glo shovel snow from an Antarctic airstrip. Planes fly by, manned by sexy Frank. The women circle and yearn. Flo and Glo shovel snow from an Antarctic airstrip. Planes fly by, manned by sexy Frank. The women circle and yearn. Flo and Glo shovel snow from an Antarctic airstrip. Planes fly by, manned by sexy Frank. The women circle and yearn.

That’s both the gist and the general verbal idiosyncracy of Flo and Glo, a one-act portrait of the repetition, insularity, and obsessions of two large women in red parkas. As you might already suspect, Flo and Glo (by Katie McKee, directed by Stephen McLaughlin, and produced by the emerging company Deviant/goods at A Company of Girls) is brazenly experimental. Driven by character and language, rather than narrative, its two characters — the shrill Flo (Jamalieh Haley) and the chill Glo (Tavia Lin Gilbert) — spout non sequiturs and refrain whole sequences in triplicate. Set in an anytime Antarctica where workers live in cabins without indoor plumbing and the government hands out chocolate rations, Flo and Glo athletically frolics and gimps like a curious love-child of Lynch and Beckett.

The mercurial camaraderie of Flo and Glo inevitably evokes that of Godot’s Gogo and Didi, as the two women interrupt, repeat, mishear, fire upon, and belatedly placate each other. As personalities, they contrast brashly: Flo, with perky red pigtails bouncing atop her head, is excruciatingly high-strung, schizoid, and restrained to her uppermost vocal registers. Her nervous mania keeps her in constant motion, shoveling snow the same way germ-freaks keep washing their hands, and her chatter operates on a similar principle. "Do you think I’m fat?" and "Do you think I’m anxious?" she chirps desperately to her shoveling partner. In contrast, Glo is like Tom Waits on an ambitious cocktail of downers. Haggard, slow, and guttural, Glo doesn’t actually do a whole lot of shoveling, and in fact rarely moves from her stance staring at the snowy horizon, toking in slow-mo on one smoke after another. "Difficulty is only a mental fart," she says philosophically.

The outrageous discord between the two women’s personalities, the difference in their wavelengths, creates turbulent beats in the air. And indeed, Flo and Glo is as much about abstract sound — tenor, rhythm, language both musical and stunted — as it is about its two characters. The verbal loops slough off meaning as they’re repeated, until they resonate more as flourishes, motifs, or melody lines than as narrative statements. Heightening the sense that this play doubles as a study in language’s cadence and music is a piano accompaniment (performed by director McLaughlin) that punctuates and animates the women’s talk, like an aural puppet of their confusions and yearnings.

The women also have more literal urges for fulfillment, and for that there’s the play’s Surrealist preoccupation with sex and unapologetic sexual imagery. Flo, who just can’t seem to snag men into her "hoop," enviously describes Glo ("Miss man-woman handler, you") as being like that big egg you see in sex ed, toward which all the squiggly sperm careen. Both women speak with religious lust of the mysterious, "hot-as-a-tater-tot" Frank, who they’ve spotted removing his shirt, "spanking his monkey," and, of course, piloting those phallic planes overhead. And then there’s Flo and Glo’s setting itself, a vast, infertile wasteland, and their Sisyphean attempts to keep it clear for possible landings. It all speaks to their sense of vacuity, to their longing for psychic, via sexual, fulfillment. The women are most in awe of Frank for how "complete" he seems. "It’s like he doesn’t need anything," murmurs Glo. How, she asks Flo, could anyone be that complete? Flo doesn’t know, and when she says as much — in a voice suddenly two octaves lower and drained of all its usual manic flutter — comes the play’s most poignant moment, at once resonant and utterly empty.

Despite a small assortment of crux moments like that one, Flo and Glo’s experimental verbal sensibility and its emphatic strangeness (and, at 35 minutes, perhaps its brevity, too) conspire to make it feel more of a study than a fully realized work. It most often comes across as a dramatic exercise, in sprints and rests and rigorous sets of three. Theatergoers seeking the full-belly satisfaction of the traditional two-act narrative and resolution will not find that here. Flo and Glo is play, gymnastics, isometrics. And as we exercise both for its own sake and for that of the strength and flexibility to follow, what seems most promising about Deviant/goods is its willingness to strain some rather underused muscles with all its energetic repetitions.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com