"If we are women," Virginia Woolf wrote, "we think back through our mothers."

The current Army Readers Theatre performance at Fort Shafter reaches out to three generations of mothers and daughters with "If We Are Women," by Canadian playwright Joanna McClelland Glass.

The production, reprised from a Fort Shafter reading in 2001, is scaled back not only for the Readers Theatre format, but also cut to 60 minutes. The severe editing is necessary to meet competition requirements for the American Association of Community Theatres. Readers Theatre will enter the production in the competition once this run ends.

The hourlong script, adapted from the original two-act play and directed by Vanita Rae Smith, holds together remarkably well. Granted, a great deal of detail and character references have had to be eliminated, but the sense of the situation is accentuated by the abbreviated plot line.

It takes place on a spring day in the Connecticut beach house of Jessica MacMillan Cohen (Eden-Lee Murray). She's mourning the death of her longtime lover, and attended by her mother and her former mother-in-law. All are waiting for Jessica's daughter Polly (Shawna Masuda), who has stayed out all night after a party and, it is feared, has been axed to pieces or lost her virginity.

The three widows are a remarkably disparate group, each with her own regrets and grievances against her life.

Ruth MacMillan (CoCo Wiel) is Jessica's mother. Married for years to an alcoholic who sold off household items to pay the "bootlegger," she regrets never having learned to read.

Rachel Cohen (Shari Lynn) is Jessica's former mother-in-law and a longtime agitator against discrimination directed at Jews and women. She has stacked up several degrees, but none of them from the "right" universities, whose entrance was denied her.

Although a published author, Jessica herself regrets never having attended college. Worse, she has begun to suspect her recently deceased partner may have had a side love affair.

But when young Polly finally creeps back into the house to announce she's abandoning her acceptance to Yale University to try farming in Colorado with her new beau, the older women join ranks to stop her.

The action of the edited play pits two grandmothers and a mother against a headstrong girl. In that onslaught, the women revisit their own youthful choices and examine how mothers shape the characters of their daughters.

Interestingly, the men in their lives never appear. But all have contributed to the characters of these strong women, for better or worse.

While breakdown and failure seems to be their frame of reference, there also is abundant irony and good humor. One of the script's most telling lines makes it into the program notes, but not into the edited script: "Every time a kid is born, we start from zero." Watching them set to work on the newest generation becomes the fascination of the script.