Renny Krupinski's script is an ambitious one: chronicling the lives of one family across three generations,
If you're here for the Alphabet Girl herself you'll be waiting for a long time.
Kaitlin Howard puts on a good performance, switching between the characters with minimalistic costume changes. Her stand-out role would be that of the middle generation, playing the thoroughly screwed-over mother and daughter superbly. Her anxiety and haughtiness contrast nicely with the grandmother's Cockney roots and the daughter's peppy attitude when recounting the family history. Howard works well to jump between the three different monologues in the play, and at the end props up a hard-to-believe twist.
For a play which has a title revolving around the Alphabet Girl, it takes the script a while to actually introduce this concept. However, when it does it comes with a twist which catches the audience completely off-guard. True, it is a dark twist, but is not alluded to or signposted in any way. This would be fine if the twist weren't so over-the-top. Instead, Krupinski's script goes from mundane to dark and twisted in thirty seconds. No amount of work done on Howard's part can compensate for the complete change in tone, although she does handle it incredibly well.
The play is overall pretty confused. When it's mundane and bitter, it does so well. When it's psychotic and twisted, it does fairly well. However, the way the two styles are mashed together is so discordant it's at risk of feeling like the show has well and truly jumped the shark. Some elaboration on the ending of the play would've been better, because if you're here for the Alphabet Girl herself you'll be waiting for a long time.
