Spring Green is a town built for summer tourism and long light, yet even in winter there is activity. It’s a fitting backdrop for Two Crows Theatre Company's production of Sandra, staged at the Slowpoke Lounge & Cabaret, where the audience sits close enough to register every shift in breath.

It is an intimate room for a play this exposed.

David Cale’s script asks a single actor to sustain roughly 90 minutes alone onstage, inhabiting multiple characters while guiding us through a disappearance in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, a love affair, and a gradual recalibration of identity. That kind of writing needs two anchors: a formidable actor and a director who understands restraint. This production has both.

Sandra (Colleen Madden), recently separated with a pre-divorce freedom, travels to Mexico to search for her missing friend Ethan, a young, gay composer and pianist who has vanished. The premise hints at a thriller. What unfolds feels closer to a confessional, part mystery and part character study. At times, the work reads like an extended essay, circling ideas about desire, instability, and reinvention. That approach mostly works. When Cale trusts the language and space of his play, the piece sharpens.

But the storytelling does not always hold that edge. The narrative is propelled by the disappearance, yet occasionally wanders into plotlines that feel adjacent rather than necessary. These detours dilute momentum. As the script expands with tonal shifts, overlapping identities and parallel tracks, the variety adds texture. What’s lost is cohesion.

Mexico functions as more than a backdrop. Puerto Vallarta carries a charged presence, especially given contemporary headlines about cartel violence and organized crime. Those echoes are not overstated, but they register. Beneath the central mystery, another dynamic emerges. Both Sandra and Ethan have their sobriety questioned. Both have romantic entanglements that complicate how they are perceived. Yet the world of the play responds differently to each. Sandra, attractive, straight, narratively centered, is followed and believed. Ethan is more easily dismissed. His instability reads as failure rather than vulnerability. His sexuality subtly shapes how he is framed and how quickly he is written off. Whether Cale intends critique or is simply reflecting social optics, the imbalance adds friction.

Colleen Madden carries the evening. She is not reciting a monologue; she’s inhabiting ever-changing characters. Which means the audience must be brought in close — a shift in breath precedes a character turn. A spine recalibrates mid-sentence. Weight settles differently in the hips. Madden does not over-signal transitions. She executes them all. The performance feels both raw and engineered. There is a pivotal moment where Madden’s physical presence telegraphs a turn before it is fully articulated in language.

That control matters. Without it the script could tip toward melodrama. Instead, even the more volatile moments remain grounded. At Slowpoke, a rapt audience watched a performance so disciplined it made stillness feel active.

Director Samantha Martinson keeps the staging spare. She understands that tension in a one-woman piece lives in modulation, not volume. Cale’s play unfolds organically. It circles, accumulates, and occasionally meanders. When it drifts, the performance pulls it back. The mystery of what happened to Ethan matters, but the play ultimately hinges on something quieter: who gets believed, who gets dismissed, and who is allowed to reinvent themselves.

Editor’s note: The review was of the dress rehearsal performance.