A “VALENTINE” TO REMEMBER

It doesn’t matter if you’ve already seen the play, or the movie starring Pauline Collins, you must see what Carlisle Ellis does with the part in Live Theatre Workshop’s production of “Shirley Valentine” by the British playwright Willy Russell.

In this one-woman play, Ellis gives Shirley a full-bodied warmth and open-hearted appeal that had the audience on its feet cheering for more curtain calls. It is difficult to say what the veteran actress does that makes Shirley’s personality feel so compelling. She just has that certain manner.

Directed by Sabian Trout, LTW’s artistic director, Ellis doesn’t create a woman who overcomes her problems by being feisty. She is no Erin Brockovich. Neither is she rigid, defiant, obstinate or otherwise disagreeable.

She is a spunky lass – at least she used to be back in her student days. But like so many people, she always chose to do the right thing, to do whatever was expected of her. She had a proper, responsible middleclass marriage, raised two children, and endured how her husband always took her for granted. Not that he was a bad sort, just a boring sort.

“I used to know so many people,” she said wistfully. “Wonder where they went to.”

Shirley has the same thoughts about her dreams. Now 52, with her two children grown, she remembers how she always planned to leave her husband Joe once the kids were grown. “But by then there was no place to go,” she adds with a deep sense of rue.

Act One is taken up with getting to know and sympathize with Shirley, a woman too nice to ever be considered uppity. But Shirley does have her wry observations, expressed in a down-to-earth practicality.

“Marriage is like the Middle East,” she points out with her chipper British accent. “There is no solution.”

She also goes into great detail about the proper pronunciation of “clitoris,” then presents a longer discussion about how the sexual revolution of the 1960s changed all the rules of society that were in effect when she was growing up.

Underlying all this is the acceptance that, at some point, the amount of personal bravery it takes to break out of middle class conformity is huge. If you remember the 1970s, you also remember that “Shirley Valentine” is sort of a “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” for the somewhat older set.

Everything changes after intermission, when Shirley gets to her Greek vacation island and meets Costas, who works in a tavern and depends on the passing tourists’ scene for his social life.

He is a charmer, to be sure, and Shirley has no defenses against his engaging manner. Not that it matters. She is not about to be interested in maintaining a proper attitude. She’s already done that for 52 years.

Then we are halfway through the second act when Shirley realizes there is no way she can leave this sunny isle of happiness and return to her family in rainy old London. Then her husband comes to Greece to bring her home.

In the course of the evening Ellis travels quite an arc from being a dowdy house wife who gets through each afternoon sipping wine in a coffee mug, to becoming a free spirit with a powder blue headscarf and stylish sunglasses. The beauty of it is remembering all the subtle twists and turns she took along the way.

· For show times and ticket prices, www.livetheatreworkshop.org