Événement

The Mineola Twins

The play is Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel's social history of American women, touches down to check the temper of the times in the Eisenhower, Nixon and Bush Administrations. Everything is seen from the perspective of a pair of furiously demented variations on that icon of a doll, Barbie. Myrna and Myra, conceived at the same moment of bliss, are identical in every respect except for what Myrna, the ''good'' sister, refers to as the development in ''the chestal region.'' As her first suitor notes, Myrna is ''stacked.''

The ''bad'' sister, Myra, sometimes described as ''the whore of Babylon'' (remember, this takes place on Long Island), is flat as a pancake.

When first met, the teen-age Myrna, her chestal region a sight gag when the audience sees her in profile, works at a Mineola luncheonette. Her only wish (other than winning the Homemakers of America Senior Award) is to marry Mr. Right, move to Levittown and raise a family. Mr. Right is Jim, a virginal ''older'' man (in his early 20's) who is advising the Ford Motor Company how to sell young buyers on the company's still top-secret and unnamed revolutionary new automobile.

Myra has no single boyfriend. She prefers to take her boyfriends in groups, like the first-string squad of the Mineola football team. She spends her time getting suspended from Mineola High and, when she isn't working as a cocktail waitress in what Myrna calls ''a roadside tavern of ill repute,'' she hangs out in Greenwich Village, where women wear pants.

Though the sisters are bound in a psychic union that allows each to invade the other's mind, they profoundly loathe each other. No matter that each eventually leaves Mineola on a different path, their destinies remain locked as they deal with separate but parallel tragedies. Apparently, not even unequal bra sizes can break the bond of sisterhood.