Jane Huefner as Margery (left) and Jensie Anderson as LaPriel in Pygmalion Productions’ Tender Hooks. Image by Barb Gandy.

Pygmalion Productions opened its 2024/2025 season Friday with Tender Hooks, Julie Jensen’s sad, funny and (under Fran Pruyn’s uber-talented direction) completely captivating play that centers on LaPriel, a nervous, 60-something widowed piano teacher (perfectly played by Jensie Anderson) who buys Postum by the case, devoutly reads the Doctrine & Covenants, is manifestly terrified of most everything in her world, and just now is particularly unnerved by a family that has moved next door in a truck with California plates. Plates that, she speculates for no real reason, may have been stolen!

Her sister Margery isn’t concerned about the plates but does think inbreeding is something to worry about in southern Utah in 1963: “They’re more’n likely pligs . . . It’s something you got to consider these days. Cuz there’s pligs movin into all these little towns. Takin’ ’em right over.” This is a thought that horrifies La Priel, who pours the two some more Postum so that they can further consider the terrible possibilities of a polygamist advance on their small community.

Another major concern under discussion is the two cats owned by the invading family and Margery, played gruffly and amusingly by Jane Huefner, delivers a theory about felines that in itself is worth the price of admission.

Addie Bowler as the 11 year-old Letha. Image by Barb Gand

LaPriel is as fascinated with the strange clan as she is frightened and has befriended the 11-year-old daughter who, like her four brothers, boasts a physical deformity: “Every one of you has got something missing,” La Priel tells young Letha, who has but three fingers on her right hand. She wants piano lessons, but La Priel isn’t certain she can learn with missing fingers. Energetically played by Addie Bowler, in a spot-on portrayal of a slightly off-balance pre-adolescent who incessantly chatters, telling tales on her family, asking rapid-fire rude questions and making queer observations (“Whew, that’s scary. You sleep in the same room as a dead man used to. Is it the same bed?” she inquires regarding La Priel’s late husband.) She constantly slurps mint Jell-O powder straight from the box and begs La Priel to keep it safe for her if she has to go home—as she will want more of the stuff the next day. Then sticks out her green-stained tongue for emphasis. Bowler entirely inhabits her role.

It’s 75 minutes of all-around tremendous acting and dialogue well worth your time, “about a class system at work in the most unlikely of places,” says the playwright.

The other essential cast member is Letha’s mother, Mrs. Hicks, who confesses to having gotten pregnant and then gotten married. “I made that mistake,” she says. “So (Letha) don’t have to.” Believably portrayed by Brenda Hattingh, she is about 30 and a seductive character who La Priel finds threatening, as she does most everyone. The two have a long creepy discussion about cats in the middle of the night; Mrs. Hicks claiming to have killed one of theirs that day by putting her in a bucket of water. “The kids got tired of her. Set fire to her. Tie her up. Them kinda things. I decided it was time I got rid of her.”

Stage manager and light operator is Jennie Pett; the complicated soundscape design and operation of children praying and chanting jump-rope rhymes in the background is by Mikal Troy Klee; Allen Smith designed the set, which is worth settling in your seat early to leisurely observe—it’s a spotless kitchen circa Fifties Sears Catalog design with an ancient Hotpoint refrigerator discovered by Smith’s father; light design by Kai Sadowski; costumes by Madison Howell Wilkins; Daisy Blake Perry handled publicity; and Robert Holman did photography.

Tender Hooks, by Julie Jensen, Pygmalion Productions, Salt Lake City, through Oct. 19

Ann Poore

A graduate of the University of Utah, Ann Poore is a freelance writer and editor who spent most of her career at The Salt Lake Tribune. She was the 2018 recipient of the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Artist Award in the Literary Arts.