[In the following review, Evans lauds Vogel's humor as well as the inspired premise of The Mineola Twins.]

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive, The Baltimore Waltz) has built The Mineola Twins around an inspired premise, rich in comic potential.

In Vogel's satiric look at American womanhood from the 1950s-'80s, twins Myrna and Myra are identical opposites. Alike in looks, they are night and day in attitudes and experiences. Life and the playwright put them through the wringer, with wild adventures that drive them to opposite ends of the sociopolitical spectrum, despite occasional psychic flashes of sisterly connection. Produced off-Broadway in 1999 with Swoosie Kurtz doing a bravura turn in the title roles, The Mineola Twins makes its Houston debut in an uneven yet worthwhile production at the Little Room Downstairs Theater.

Vogel's starting point is the suburban enclave of Mineola, N.Y., in 1959. The era's cliche: There are good girls and bad girls, no in-betweens. Myrna is the goody girl next door, teasing upright boyfriend Jim to the point of distraction, yet determined to save herself for marriage and the housewifely bliss she envisions.

In contrast, Myra is tough, restless, cool. She digs hanging out in Greenwich Village and, to Myrna's mortification, has earned her reputation as Mineola's bad girl. Jim visits Myra in a hotel room, on a mission from Myrna, to try to talk some sense into the wild twin—but winds up another of Myra's conquests. Myrna turns up, accuses her sister of wrecking her life, and dumps Jim.

Jumping to 1969, Myra is a counterculture revolutionary, on the lam from the FBI after a botched bank robbery, which was somehow meant to protest the Vietnam War. After marriage, divorce and shock therapy, Myrna is more uptight than ever. Pretending to help her fugitive sister flee the country, Myrna actually is in league with the agents out to capture Myra. Myrna's son, Kenny, who detests his mom and admires his far-out aunt, is determined to help Myra escape.

By 1989, released after a prison term, Myra has settled down with a lesbian lover and a job heading Mineola's Planned Parenthood clinic. Myra's teen-age son, Benjamin, rejecting his mother's values, has become a fan of Myrna, now a right-wing radio commentator and author of Profiles in Chastity—and secretly aligned with a group that bombs family-planning clinics.

As suggested by the program's indication that the action unfolds during the Eisenhower, Nixon and Bush administrations, Vogel does not disguise her play's political agenda. Yet like the often outrageous situations, her political points are made with offbeat humor and bite.

The strength of the play is Vogel's implicit understanding that conformity and rebelliousness are the yin and yang of American culture. Caught like siblings in a love-hate bond, each unintentionally nurtures the other, if only through the inevitable impulse of reaction. That the twins' sons reject their mothers' lifestyles and become their political opposites is an apt reflection of the pendulum.

Working on a shoestring in Little Room's tiny space, Richard Laub has directed an unpolished, no-frills rendition. It has some sluggish moments, takes its time building comic momentum and doesn't handle the one-twin-exits/the-other-enters moments as smoothly as it might.

Yet Laub has drawn essentially sound performances that convey the play's basic strengths. He also supplies inventive treatment of the twins' hallucinatory dream-monologues.

Kara Greenberg does good work in the title roles, increasing in confidence as the action progresses. Her Myra begins as a droll take on a '50s wayward girl, stumbles through her counter-culture confusion and matures into a sensible midlife standoff between resignation and social commitment.

The prissy Myrna, however, is the funnier role, and here Greenberg really goes to town. As Myrna's angry disapproval hardens into stony self-righteousness, Greenberg enacts a vivid caricature of the cultural warrior; her radio show provokes howls. If Dr. Laura needs an understudy, Greenberg can fill the bill in hilarious fashion.

Natalie Maisel kids the conventional upright 1950s male as Jim; later, she's a pleasant, supportive Sarah (Myra's lover). Peter Gehring brings naturalness and enthusiasm to the two sons, budding hippie Kenny and clean-cut conservative Ben. Greg Gorden and Drew Bettge cut up goofily in their wordless roles as cavorting scene-changers.

While not the best rendition imaginable, Little Room's Mineola Twins is a serviceable take on a play that merits attention.

Additional coverage of Vogel's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale Group: Contemporary American Dramatists; Contemporary Authors, Vol. 108; Contemporary Dramatists, Ed. 5; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 76; Contemporary Women Dramatists; Drama for Students, Vol. 14; Literature Resource Center; and Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4.