By Jackie Demaline
Enquirer staff writer

Women's Theatre Initiative spends most of the year meeting every other week in the back room at Kaldi's Coffeehouse and Bookstore in Over-the-Rhine informally reading plays by and about women.

Every autumn the members grab their favorites and stage more formal readings in theaters around town with an eye toward choosing one for a full production the following summer.

Anne Valauri and Mary Tensing in Ironmistress (Enquirer photo/STEVEN M. HERPPICH)

The group leans toward intellectually challenging, contemporary British feminist work set in the past. This year's entry, Ironmistress, by April DeAngelis, is all of the above.

It's about a widowed mother (Mary Tensing, playing it as tight and painful as her 19th century plaited bun) and the young daughter she is selling off into marital servitude to secure her future.

Anne Valauri, who proved her talent last winter in My Children! My Africa! for Know Tribe continues to be entirely watchable here, and is the single best reason to see Ironmistress as it finishes its short run Thursday through Saturday at Columbia Performance Center (3900 Eastern Ave., Columbia Tusculum`).

The above description is far clearer than the play, which owes a lot, but not enough, to Harold Pinter. DeAngelis embraces his evasions and employment of the oblique and obscure. She doesn't have his understanding and great dramatic gift for taking a situation's threat and building it into something the audience emotionally takes on as its own.

That might also be the work of director Kelly Germain, who doesn't encourage Tensing toward any emotional scope beyond sexual repression (where her performance catches fire) and contained rage, no doubt a suggestion that the enormous furnace at the iron mill holds no more fire and fury than the woman who owns it.

The setting is nicely dank, suggesting a grime-belching foundry and the miserable life it offers to all who live in its shadow.

Jennifer Drake, whose sound design was a star of You Don't Exist to Me in the Cincinnati Fringe, delivers again, marvelously establishing a sense of place. Good work, too, from lighting designer Elizabeth Harris, costumer Gretchen Vaughn and set coordinator Regina Pugh.

Mother and daughter spend their time together playing games. The mother becomes her younger self with daughter Valauri moving into the parental role; Valauri also transforms herself into an underclass girl who makes her living on her back if she wants to live at all.

Most affecting is the short scene when the mother pays a visit to her daughter in her new home, where the girl has been inserted into the household machine (including the bedroom) of which her new husband is master.

Ironmistress never feels like more than an intellectual exercise, the kind that invites you to scrunch your forehead in large thoughts about matriarchs, patriarchs, mothers and daughters, women in the workplace and even our place in the post-Industrial Age.

Its 70-minute running time feels plenty long enough.

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Ironmistress, through July 24, Women's Theatre Initiative, Columbia Performance Center, 3900 Eastern Ave., 604-8545.

E-mail jdemaline@enquirer.com