Beatrice Georgalidis is tough not to notice in Duluth, Minnesota. Just that name, so flamboyant and not Scandinavian, is enough to set her apart.
The release does not explain why she made the move. But This Room illustrates, in a voice less direct and more visceral than public relations copy, the life Georgalidis lived before success came calling. She arrives in New York with two suitcases and two hundred dollars to attend a prestigious dance program. Sleeping only three hours a night, while working full-time as a waitress and attending classes, she quickly burns out.
Her psyche fractures under pressure, and she loses control of her beauty, strength, sexuality, and grace. Her only friend, Ebony, is a six-foot-four exotic dancer with a son who goes looking for hope in a graveyard in Atlanta, Georgia. Both Ebony and Overton are much more than that. Ebony should have had more stage time; the percent-white Duluth audience should have known better. When challenged with responding thoughtfully to the entire play, a frustrating portion of the audience only legitimized the humanity of the characters whose faces looked like theirs.
Beauty, Strength, Sexuality, and Grace spend most of the show in a variety of tight black outfits, dancing in discord with or opposition to one anotherβdashing at odd angles across the wide stage, only coming into contact when their disparate paths somehow coincide.
Her dance is equal parts sex and anger; are those what Whitey lost when she relinquished Strength? If so, what was lost when Sexuality went missing? Even while facing away from each other, they move in concert. As projected images of Greenland mountains swoop toward some summit and the music is swirling and racing toward heights of its own, Grace is held aloft, parallel to the stage, by Beauthy, Strength and Sexuality.
