Sympathetic performance revives 'Shirley Valentine' |

Bridget Bean is the Gorilla Theatre's managing director, and usually she's seen greeting patrons or announcing the five-minute warning to use the loo before show time.

She's also got acting chops that she exercises on occasion. Four years ago, for example, she starred in "Shirley Valentine." Her performance was so well received, the company decided to bring back Willy Russell's one-woman play, with Bean once again at the helm.

It was a dead brilliant move.

Shirley Valentine Bradshaw is a British, middle-aged housewife. Depressed, lonely and deeply unsatisfied, she schedules her life around her husband's meals, grocery shopping, cleaning, tending and mending. Her friends are the kitchen wall and Jane. Now that her kids are grown, they are the only faces she talks to on a regular basis.

"Wall" knows everything about Shirley. As Shirley Valentine, she was brave. She defied authority. She was authentic. As Shirley Bradshaw, she's a drone. She's dispirited. She's boring.

When Jane invites her on a two-week vacation in Greece, Shirley is torn between what she wants to do and what she has to do. But a fortuitously unpleasant meal with her husband makes the decision for her. She will reunite with Shirley Valentine at a table by the sea, watching the sunset and sipping wine in the country where the grape is grown.

Bean was sublime as ab fab Shirley Valentine. She lived and breathed this woman who could be a neighbor, a friend or within. As an expat Brit herself, Bean's native inflections put a hilarious spin on everything from chips to sex.

But she wasn't just funny and likeable. She was heartbreaking as well. Her loneliness was palpable, though no more so than her obvious thirst for the life imagined outside the bars of her every day. Under Nancy Cole's seamless direction, Bean quietly and steadily made her journey to enlightenment. She was someone to root for no matter what and the underdog undeserving of pack-dog status.

England's dampened grays segued in Act II to Rebekah Alderson and Jennifer Cunningham's splendid Greece-inspired scenic painting. As Bean lounged on the beachlike set, happily talking to "Rock" now instead of "Wall," the warm backdrop of Aegean blues, a white-washed taverna and rose cascades mirrored Shirley's realized inner world: a pie-high dream that's landed safely on terra firma.