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Sweeney Ascendant: Ingénue No More




There’s a particular shade of red lipstick—a blue-red, really—that brings to mind porcelain skin, a slash of defiance, and a certain knowingness. It’s not a color for shrinking violets. And it’s the exact shade I saw on Sadie Sweeney’s lips last night, a detail that wouldn’t be so remarkable if it weren’t for the fact that the last time I saw her, she was all but drowning in ruffles and blush, playing the innocent to the hilt.


That was two years ago, in that treacly period piece, wasn’t it? The one with the suffocating costumes and the even more suffocating dialogue. Even then, you could tell Sweeney was capable of more. There was a flicker in her eyes, a subtle shift in her voice that hinted at something sharper, something with more bite. A diamond waiting to be cut, I remember thinking, though I probably used a less hackneyed metaphor in my review.


Last night, though, there were no ruffles, no blushing ingenue. No, last night, Sadie Sweeney walked onto that bare stage in a simple black slip dress and blew everyone away.


The play? Let’s be honest, the play was secondary. A decent enough script, sure, about a fading actress grappling with ambition, regret, and one hell of a complicated family history. But it was Sweeney who breathed life into it, who turned the words on the page into something raw and real and utterly transfixing.


There’s a scene, towards the end of the second act, where her character, Lily, finally cracks. Years of resentment, of compromise, of swallowing down her own desires come spilling out in a torrent of rage and grief. It’s the kind of scene that can easily veer into melodrama, but Sweeney navigated it with an almost surgical precision. One minute she was whispering, voice thick with unshed tears, the next she was practically spitting fire, her whole body taut with anger. And then, just like that, she was still. Utterly still. The silence in the theater was almost unbearable, broken only by the collective intake of breath when she finally spoke again, voice ragged, barely a whisper. "I’m tired," she said, and it was the most devastating thing I’ve heard on stage in years.


It’s the kind of performance that stays with you long after the curtain falls. You find yourself thinking about it at odd moments, replaying certain lines, certain gestures, in your head. It makes you want to call everyone you know and tell them to see it, even though you know that words can’t do it justice. It makes you want to go back and see it again, just to make sure it was as good as you remember.


And that, in the end, is the mark of a true talent. Sweeney could have easily continued down the ingenue path, could have carved out a perfectly respectable career playing sweet, innocent girls on the verge of womanhood. But she didn’t. She chose something riskier, something more challenging. She chose to push herself, to explore the darker corners of human emotion, and in doing so, she’s become one of the most exciting young actresses working today.


I, for one, can’t wait to see what she does next. And I have a feeling that blue-red lipstick will be making a few more appearances on stage and screen in the years to come. It’s a color that suits her. A color that says, “I’m here, I’m not afraid, and I’m just getting started.”

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