As Stacey Derosier’s lighting comes up on the stage of Charly Evon Simpson’s “sandblasted,” which is currently being co-presented by Vineyard Theatre and Women’s Project Theater at the Vineyard, Angela (a willful yet vulnerable Brittany Bellizeare) and Odessa (a confident and temperamental Marinda Anderson) slowly emerge from behind beach umbrellas (“where the sand is”). Both complain about the omnipresence of sand on and in their bodies and Odessa’s arm falls off, suddenly but not unexpectedly. They have embarked on an extended journey with Adah (a seemingly omniscient, yet oddly evasive Rolanda Watts) to hopefully learn how to stop falling apart.

Angela, Odessa, and all Black women are experiencing the same catastrophic loss experienced by Odessa. Angela describes this condition to her brother Jamal (Andy Lucien), “it starts off with ears and noses and then toes and fingers and then its entire fucking arms and legs and breasts and tongues and lips and butts and then there is nothing else to fall off so we start falling apart on the inside.” “sandblasted” follows Angela and Odessa’s Adah-driven quest for healing in body, mind, and spirit.

Charly Evon Simpson’s inspiration for her narrative is clearly rooted in absurdism, particularly in two works of Samuel Beckett: “Waiting for Godot” (1952) and “Happy Days” (1961). In the latter of the two, protagonist Winnie – buried up to her neck – wonders what her predicament “means? What’s it meant to mean?” Although Winnie discovers no answer to her queries, playwright Simpson attempts to provide some redemption and release for her characters who grapple with similar existential questions.

“Beckett’s distorted and dismembered bodies have become part of the global cultural imaginary of the 21st century.” (Anna McMullan, “Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama” (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 1.) “In Beckett’s later plays, the distortion of the body goes from physical to metaphorical: heads float, mouths utter words in darkness, voices echo through the texts incorporeally.” (William McEvoy, “Introduction to ‘Happy Days’ (British Library, “Discovering Literature 20^th Century, September 7, 2017).

The twenty-first century, like many prior centuries, has been a difficult space for women, particularly for Black women and other women of color – from disparities in income, housing, employment, and overall opportunity to the discrimination against and murder of Black Trans women. Ms. Simpson does not provide a precise litany of those things falling apart internally and externally; however, as in Ntozake Shange’s “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf,” the themes of identity, alienation and loneliness, race, and racism are evident.

Under Summer L. Williams’s meticulous direction, the cast portrays the characters and their conflicts with precision, honesty, and authenticity. If there is any problem with “sandblasted” it is the script itself. From the opening scene, it is obvious that the play’s action is episodic and not linear. The difficulty is that many of the scenes seem repetitive or overly written.  A few scenes even seem unnecessary.

The transition to the final scene where Angels and Odessa reunite with Adah seems contrived and the scene itself seems unnecessary. There are several places where “sandblasted” could have ended and still have been effective. Even Angela and Odessa’s important “lessons” could have been shared earlier in the play. Odessa: “I don’t want to feel like I am waiting but I also know there is waiting to do to see if there is a way to heal to see how we survive to see to learn to understand what it is to be in my body now today.” Angela: “Yeah and if while we do all of that if we can sit here there and say I’m going to be anyway I’m going to live anyway I’m going to survive and thrive and breathe anyway then waiting can just be us, living.”

How they/we will wait, can wait, remains to be seen. Meanwhile, “being” and “living” seem like admirable and, hopefully, attainable alternatives to falling apart.