THEATER REVIEW : Play’s Dance Setting Reflects Rigors of Life : In ‘Barbed Wire,’ the 10 women who meet in ballet class derive strength from their physical and emotional struggles.

The title phrase in “Barbed Wire Under Your Armpits” comes from the instructions a ballet teacher gives her students in the play--to maintain proper position by imagining they’re trying to keep their arms above prickly balls of barbed wire.

But for the 10 women of various ages and occupations who make up the class, it’s an image that resonates far beyond the dance studio where they gather once a week for a reprieve from the chaotic pressures of modern living.

“Sometimes I think we do live our lives with barbed wire underneath us,” says Hester (Vickie Patik), a former ballerina who attends the class to practice her art, even though her professional career is behind her.

“We know if we let down, if we lie down, the consequences are worse than all the effort it takes to keep ourselves dancing.”

Discovering the strength and beauty in that effort is the central concern of this promising new play by Santa Barbara playwright Ellen K. Anderson. The work, which receives its first full staging at the Center Stage Theatre, offers a perceptive and often poetic plunge into the sensibilities of contemporary womanhood, with its conflicting responsibilities, loyalties and impulses.

Anderson’s is one of those rare voices in contemporary playwriting that articulates these issues in strikingly feminine terms. Instead of clearly defined conflicts and linear through-lines, Anderson’s approach is more elliptical. The lives of her characters emerge from snatches of conversation or internal monologues delivered in direct address to the audience. And the drama’s movement is not toward resolution of a particular story line but rather, as in dancing, toward uniting the individual dancers in a pattern that embraces all.

These ethereal aims are nicely complemented by well-tuned dialogue that gives each character a solid center, and by admirably believable performers.

Patik, the ballerina, has obviously had professional dance training--as has the class instructor (Victoria Finlayson). But as one would expect in a non-professional dance class, the skills--and the goals--of the students vary considerably.

In the course of a very tight 90 minutes (played without interruption), we meet a lawyer (Sam Muir) racked with guilt over her compulsive lateness (her boyfriend suffered a stroke waiting to meet her); an elderly widow (Marion Freitag) seeking the life fulfillment forbidden her in her youth; and a nurse (Delta Giordano) coming to terms with her approaching blindness.

Rounding out the class are a former Vegas showgirl (Susan Jackson); a lesbian (Jessica John) struggling with an advanced case of sibling rivalry; a biochemist (Samantha Santana) intent on bucking career stereotypes; and a pregnant naif (Mary McGloin) determined to raise her child out of wedlock.

It’s only with the play’s sole male character, the pregnant girl’s hot-tempered boyfriend (Edward K. Meehan), that the play loses its penetrating insight. His recurring intrusions into the class introduce a contrived note in an otherwise well-modulated hymn to feminine self-definition. The complexities of male-female relations are too expansive for this kind of telegraphing, and the play is more successful when it keeps within its ladies-only territory.

While that may make it seem like the flip side of a men’s poker game, what we find here is very different. In poker, the name of the game is concealment, whereas these dancers practice revelation. And that implies more about the differences between men and women than many a line of dialogue.

Details

* WHAT: “Barbed Wire Under Your Armpits.”

* WHEN: Tonight through Saturday at 8 p.m.

* WHERE: Center Stage Theatre at the Paseo Nuevo Mall in Santa Barbara.

* COST: $12.50.

* FYI: For reservations or further information, call (805) 963-0408.