GOLDENSEAL

“And yet the stories about female friendship rarely end well,” opines one of the protagonists in Hummel’s close examination of one such blighted relationship.

Estranged for more than four decades, former friends and confidantes Lacey and Edith reunite for a meeting, in 1990, on Lacey’s turf. (The encounter, orchestrated at Edith’s behest, would have to be at Lacey’s place, as she now rarely leaves her hotel suite in Los Angeles.) Over the course of a long evening and a carefully planned room service dinner, the two aging women discuss their earlier relationship and subsequent lives. It’s clear that both bear emotional scars related to the apparently seismic rupture of their friendship and the facts of that breach are slowly revealed over the course of the night. Each of the old friends attempts to justify her own position in a series of sharp discussions and emotional monologues but a heartwarming rapprochement doesn’t seem in the offing when one of the two indicates she’s hated the other for four decades (and still does). Lacey’s backstory is complicated by a family life marked by sadness and loss, much of it attributable to the horrific effects of the Holocaust upon her family. The scarifying effects of Edith’s family life relate to poverty, violence, and isolation but the outcome was the same: a young girl who revels in the friendship and understanding of a first close ally. Ranging from pre–World War II Europe to the glamorous era of postwar Hollywood with stops in New York City and a girl’s camp set in the northern woods, Hummel’s dissection of what went wrong between Lacey and Edith borrows from both stagecraft and fairy tale in its analysis.

Hummel delivers a lifetime of pathos and revelation in the course of one night.