There is no intermission in this almost two hour play, but it doesn't matter.

To be honest I was shocked when I checked my watch as the lights came up and we were ushered out into the evening to find it was almost 10 p.m.

Director Sheilagh Robertson did an impressive job with her minimalist set and few actors to pull together the at times emotional or shocking experiences of a variety of women.

And the four women who have been tasked with playing 27 characters all fluidly move themselves from one to the next with merely a switch of the hat or the addition of an accent.

This is no small task as they play anywhere from a three-year-old child to a cancer striken mother-of-two and a 79-year-old grandmother.

'String of Pearls', written by Michele Lowe and originally produced by the City Theatre Company in Pittsburgh, is now being performed by the Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society at the Daylesford Theatre.

The four actresses — Deborah Pharoah-Williams, Tania Weller, Deborah Smith-Joell and Lillian Veri — play women from 1969 up until the 20th Century.

It is shocking at times. Not many people spoke when Ms. Pharoah, as she played Beth, describes how she received her pearl necklace from her husband. Read — it has to do with their bedroom activities.

When her husband actually coughs-up for the real thing, he then has a heart attack and the story follows the necklace.

From her neck to the stomach of a fish, to the funeral home, to a lesbian gravedigger who returns the gift to Beth, the string forms a bond.

Never clichéd and catching the audience off-guard (who would have thought from a fish gut to the throat of one woman's dead mother) unfortunately it does drag in one spot.

The pool. One poor-rich mother (this is Ms. Pharoah-Williams transformed into an investment banker's wife) enrols her daughter into a community pool and befriends mothers from another income level.

When they find out they ostracise her and she throws her necklace into the Hudson (she lives in New York) and hence the fish swallows it.

To clear her conscienec she keeps diving into the nonexistent pool. As she continues to get down and then return to the "diving board" it drags. It gets repetitive.

Luckily it doesn't last for long and the audience, who clearly enjoyed the play, were whisked back into the swing of things.

I do believe that the final scene — one between a 300 lb lesbian and a 79-year-old grandmother — did rattle the nerves (at least mine), but that proves a point.

It challenges the audience to see women in various roles in various times.

And though obviously neither of these actresses are 300 lbs nor are they 79-years-old, but they did such a good job I could picture it — even if I didn't want to.

The play opened Thursday night at 8 p.m. and runs until May 1.

Tickets $25, are available at the Daylesford Theatre Box Office from 5.30 p.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays only and between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. on performance nights.

Call 292-0848 for more information. Otherwise tickets can be purchased at www.bmds.bm.