By Colin Dabkowski

NEWS ARTS WRITER

 In the theater, as in literature and film, few things hold more fascination for audiences than a no-holds-barred battle between psychologically damaged women.

 It’s what draws people into shows like Martin McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” and to much of Pedro Almodovar’s filmography, to mention two of countless examples.

 Catherine Hayes’ “Skirmishes,” a protracted bout of sibling rivalry literally conducted over the writhing body of a woman at the precipice of death, is just such a play.

 A production of the show, finely acted and keenly directed by Kelli Bocock-Natale, opened Thursday in the New Phoenix Theatre. It marks the bold and auspicious debut of the Red Thread Theatre, a company dedicated, among other things, to locally unproduced work by and prominently featuring females.

 To say that playwright Catherine Hayes has a well-developed appreciation for shock value would be vastly understating the case. The script of this spirited one-act bristles with devastating put-downs traded with crescendoing intensity by sisters Jean (Eileen Dugan) and Rita (Josephine Hogan) as they attend to their dying mother (Kathleen Betsko Yale). Jean, with a terminal martyr complex, had been tending to her mother for many months by the time long-absent Rita arrives at the eleventh hour. Conflict, as you might guess, ensues.

 Hayes has an enviable talent for the cutting one-liner — to Jean, having children is “too much like extracting giblets” and death is “overrated as a pastime” — but she sometimes struggles to drop the scrim of shock-humor and allow something like nuanced emotion to seep in.

 Dugan imbues Jean with all the tragic world-weariness of a woman whose only remaining pleasure comes from inflicting severe emotional pain on those around her. (See “August: Osage County.”) Her sarcasm is all the more lacerating for being so tossed-off.

 As Rita, Hogan creates a figure comfortably oblivious in her near-total lack of concern for others, not least of which are her long-suffering mother and sister. Hogan’s portrait of the insecure aspiring dowager finishes with a flourish when, after talking about her children for the better part of an hour, Rita proclaims that “there is nothing more boring than other people’s children.”

 At first glance, it might seem a waste of talent to cast an actress such as Kathleen Betsko Yale in the role of a bedridden invalid with two tiny bits of dialogue. But Betsko Yale, not to be outshone by her counterparts, creates a great deal of her own drama within the strict limits of her character. Her eyes dart around the room madly as the scorpion fight between Dugan and Hogan ebbs and flows, but every so often, if you’re paying attention, you catch meaningful flickers of recognition and genuine emotional pain.

 If the quality of acting in “Skirmishes” is any indication of Red Thread’s standards, the Buffalo theater scene just became a great deal richer.

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