The play, Aunt Dan and Lemon, brings together a cast of characters and a small audience for an intimate evening of provocative thought that teases at the very fringes of propriety while maintaining an intriguing tension between the innocence of self denial and the perversions of influence and yet at times, also confronts you with the obscenity and the brutality of life at its lowest base.

The engaging lilt that Ms Ward-Hays uses to draw you into her seemingly genteel and enclosed world of self denial and self indulgence is like tasting the sweet licorice of absinthe that gradually distorts the lines between right and wrong and ends by leaving one with the bitter taste of deception and feeling the pangs of guilty regrets to seduction and submission. The contrapuntal tones between the two main characters serve as perfect oppositional rings – where the introverted and reclusive life of a young Lemon is wonderfully balanced against that of the older Aunt Dan whose extroverted nature and own innocence is layered underneath a lifetime of many secrets and illusions of influence.

Lemon and Aunt Dan are like two birds, one is the caged bird of adolescent immaturity that has forsaken an adult life of freedom to live her days in a gilded sanctuary and the other is a free bird who is however caged by her desires and locked to her secrets of indulgence.

Bravo to the cast and Mr. Wallace Shawn!