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Soon enough the loggers haul the still-living and still-mute stranger to Canada, to avenge what they believe is his rejection by a heartless wife. There they encounter Marie (the gloriously ditsy Elizabeth Berridge), a gal with a broad Canadian accent who believes she has solved her messy human entanglements through her faith in God. The characters occasionally burst out into song, and a high point of the evening is a hymn Marie sings along with her peculiar protector, a bizarre and funny Susan Tyrrell, who makes the most of all three of her small roles. - Laurie Winer (entire review)

Phyllis Nagy's Butterfly Kiss (Almeida Theatre), in which tales of matricide from Lizzie Borden giving her mother 40 whacks to Anna Reynolds submerging her past in new plays, are somehow summarised in Nagy's hard-edged, often dazzlingly well written, American fable. Lily Ross (Elizabeth Berridge) is a musician whose mother (Susan Brown) is an ex-switchboard operator who thinks she looks like Tallulah Bankhead.

The action springs out of the antiseptic white prison cell where Lily is awaiting trial. ... The central issue if Lily's sexual orientation. She switches from being a 14-year-old beach tease Lolita to the role of cool pick-up in a women's bar. Those scenes, played brilliantly by Ms Berridge opposite first Larry Lamb, then Deborah Weston, are as good as anything I have seen this year.

And even if Ms Nagy loses her way in the second act where reason disappears up its own bullet-hole, we're treated to a performance of rare passion b the American actress Elizabeth Berridge as Lily.

Ms Berridge is the quintissential American adolescent, looking 14 going on 40 whenever the text requires. But more than this: her diminutive frame is disturbingly erotic.

Sliding like a balletic snake, she moves more sexually than most, even when apparently standing still.

Steven Pimlott's disciplined production dwells to a great degree on the eroticism of Ms Berridge, and who can blame him.

...Lily seeks affection with a vengeance. At the slender age of 14 she seduces one of her dad's Vietnam buddies on Jones Beach, a few years later she's entwined with an upwardly mobile lesbian. These facts are conveyed both through Lily's wavering reminiscences and her lawyer's detached probing into the past history of his client. "I can't believe she went and popped off her mommy that way" sums up his feelings on the matter, but the narrative is too diffuse for us to bother much one way or another, despite the bewitching focal presence of Elizabeth Berridge's Lily. - Neil Smith

Elizabeth Berridge is a performer of admirable skills. Even when she is in a play that literally drones for two hours, she can be most persuasive.

Take her current offering in Judith Thompson's Crackwaler, a one-level drama for which the word "grim" is insufficient, Berridge plays a retarded young whore. The garbled grammar that she speaks so authentically, her unsentimental dumbness that inspires compassion rather than driveling pity, convince us that a true human being is before us. - Don Nelsen

Judith Thompson's Crackwalker is a shocker. Its heroine, Theresa, is a pitiful creature, described by her sister Sandy as "a bad combination of a retard and a whore."

She has a possibly retarded baby by Alan, who also seems mentally deficient - the genetics are not good.

Elizabeth Berridge is wondrously convincing as the simpleminded Theresa (although her deliberately slurred speech is often difficult to follow).

Bobby is four years older than Monty, and when they're boys he insits on wrestling with him, having a need to come out on top in everything he does. ... Monty and Bobby are more like figures in a case history than fully fleshed characters. And once Bobby starts to fall for Angie, the young woman Monty is living with, it's not hard to figure out exactly where the play is heading.

The actors are all good, but only Elizabeth Berridge is able to make her character truly distinctive. As the jeans-wearing Angie, whose dependence on her mother is a source of friction with Monty, Berridge suggests a young woman unready- until late in the play -to let go of girlhood.

The one real thing onstage is Elizabeth Berridge's performance- overdone and abrasive in the first act, gentle and touching in the second, but a glorious relief either way from the inert falsity of everything around her. - Michael Feingold

In Pilgrims, the oddball is a teenaged waitress who's so shy that she can barely speak to the jock hero who wants to take her to their high-school senior picnic. This may sound like the stuff of vintage TV sitcoms, but Metcalfe's keen observations turn the situation into a bittersweet character stury, as well as a pointed statement about America's betrayal of its youth during the dark days of Vietnam.

Peter Frisch's sensitive direction once again gives his actors a chance to shine; but with Elizabeth Berridge on stage as the fragile schoolgirl, it's almost impossible to take in anyone else.

Looking for all the world like Bambi meeting a pack of wolves in the forest, this expressive actress has the electrifying talent to hold us with a soft-spoken line, a barely perceptible gesture, and the most penetrating insight into a character who isn't weird at all - just special, and beautiful. - Marilyn Stasio

Elizabeth Berridge as the shy Jilly is wonderful. Her surprising confidence in her own emotions when she becomes attracted to Roy is exactly right; we can see her growing up. And at the climax of the play, when she is reciting a Shakespeare speech for Dee and hesitates, looking at his son's picture, we believe she fears to say the next line because it predicts death - until she turns and lets Dee know that she has intuited his devastating secret. It is a fine moment for her, and for us. - D.J.R. Bruckner

A long-married couple - he keeps a beachside bar and she looks after the books and the baby - arrive on a deserted island to take a little time out. ... The idyll is interrupted by the intrusion of a motor-boat, containing a couple of rough kids, a punk rocker and his girl.

Both pairs are at a turning point. The bar-owner (John Getz) is besought by his admirably sensible wife (Patricia Richardson) to sell out to a fast food chain, and to forget his Peter Pan concept of extending a summer-style job into a life-style career.

The punk's girl (Elizabeth Berridge) tired of working in a video store, announces her intention to renounce her love, see the world, and go to live and work in Houston. The rocker (Derek D. Smith) is shaken.

Getz overstrained as the boy-child in mid-life crisis, but he had the heaviest role to carry. Miss Richardson, unworldly wise, and Smith, guitar smart, were more than adequate, but it was the sweet, bruised, indomitably pathetic and determined Miss Berridge who ran away with what there was of the play.

Miss Berridge- as might be recalled from the movie Amadeus -has a spirited way with waifs. She needed it. So did we. - Clive Barnes

Cruise Control, the new comedy at the WPA, offers the chance to see a developing young playwright, Kevin Wade (Key Exchange), and three sensational up-and-coming actors at work. ... The actors Patricia Richardson, Derek D. Smith and Elizabeth Berridge are all going places. - Frank Rich

... Yet there are no major rifts until that other boat arrives, carrying Rick, a rocker (his group is called The Shining - "That movie spoke, man; slice of life, know what I mean?"), and Suze, his nineteen-year-old shopgirl girlfriend, bored with her life and ready to split for Houston. She is crazy about Rick, the sex is great, but she has milked, she says, her twenty-mile territory dry, and must follow her wanderlust.

Under Norman Rene's unobtrusive direction, John Getz is an adequate Billy and the three others and perfection. Elizabeth Berridge is as zesty a Suze as her aperitif namesake, whether she throws herself at her lover scissoring legs first, or whether she wasxes yearningly pensive about her future. She impeccably exudes that contemporary mixture of innocence and precocious experience that makes today's young awesome in two contradictory directions. - John Simon

The Incredibly Famous Willy Rivers, Stephen Metcalfe's drama about a rock star's comeback after an assassination attempt, is something said to have interested Mick Jagger mightily - but not enough to ask for it. Several Broadway types were approached, and now it looks as though that plum role will go to Dennis Quaid. The show stars for Broadway in the spring, following a break-in engagement at San Diego's Old Globe Theater (Jan. 29-March 9). Most of its original Off-Broadway cast should be aboard - including the brilliant Elizabeth Berridge (Mrs. Mozart in the movie "Amadeus" and here a punk groupie - I told you she was brilliant). - Harry Haun

The Vampires, now at the Astor Place, is yet another excursion into the dark heart of a crazy all-American family. Directed by the author at a strident pace, it is stuffed past the brim with deranged suburbanites. Daddy (John Vickery) is a drama critic who, upon losing his job, briefly convinces himself (and others) that he's a vampire. His brother, the playwright (Graham Beckel), has a 13- year-old daughter (Elizabeth Berridge) who is alternately hooked on heroin and mystical spirtualism. The brothers' respective wives (Jayne Haynes and Anne Twomey) are cat fighters who persist in serving tea and coffee even as all hell breaks loose in the living room. (entire review)

Michael Bloom, has . . . carefully chosen his cast and . . . brought his actors together into a closely knit family. There are touching performances by, among others, Elizabeth Berridge, Anne Marie Bobby, Aideen O'Kelly. . . and, especially, by Ms. Downey and Mr. O'Leary. - Mel Gussow

Theatre Reviews