New York Fringe Festival Report: ‘The Unfortunates’

Dixie Sheridan Diana Cherkas in “The Unfortunates.”

Reviews of shows from the New York International Fringe Festival will appear on ArtsBeat through the festival’s close on Aug. 25. For more information, go to fringenyc.org.

“London is a city what would eat her own young,” says Mary Jane Kelly (Diana Cherkas) in “The Unfortunates,” and this haunting one-woman show convinces you. Mary Jane is a prostitute in 1888, in the squalid London neighborhood of Whitechapel, the killing ground of Jack the Ripper. As she downs multiple drinks in the Ten Bells pub, she regales a potential customer â€" the audience â€" with her past before embarking into the night.

The play, written by Aoise Stratford, is not a Ripper study per se, but rather an engrossing depiction of a time and place, and a woman’s struggle in a pitiless social stratum. As we learn of Mary Jane’s altercations with “coppers,” ejections from homes, abusive relationships and a trip to Paris with a kinky upper-crust john, the merciless narrowing of her world grows palpable.

Offhand references to Joseph Merrick (the Elephant Man) and Mr. Hyde add period flavor. David M. Kaplan’s set is simple yet evocative, while Ms. Cherkas’s costume, by Julia Sharp, is spot-on. (Greg Scalera’s sound design â€" all crowd murmurs and clopping horses â€" could use more understatement.) And Ms. Cherkas’s performance, directed by Ryan Scott Whinnem, is well paced and assured. When Mary Jane describes the autopsy of a friend, it’s terrifying. After all, it presages her own fate.

“The Unfortunates” continues through Saturday at Teatro Latea, 107 Suffolk Street, Lower East Side.