Duluth News-Tribune

Dominic P Papatola

For the last few years, audiences have been subject to deathless, whining, self-indulgent meditations on yuppie angst in books, television and on the stage. So it's refreshing to see that playwright Roxann Dawson has gone her contemporaries one better with Passage Through the Heart which received its premiere Wednessday night at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.
 
Yes, Dawson's hero, Rose, is another one of those annoyingly perfect aftershocks of the baby boom whose life goes awry. But instead of dishing up the histrionics, Dawson deftly peels away the layersbeneath Rose's smooth surface to give us an idea of how this yuppie was constructed, and why her current troubles threaten her very infrastructure.
 
This is a play of wonderful imagery and effective test. Contrasting her own troubled existent with Rose's charmed life a friend named Candi sums up her own luck succinctly: It's like my warranty ran out.