✭✭✩✩✩
<b>by Dave Carley, directed by Timothy Bond
Canadian Stage Company, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
February 21-March 16, 2002
</b>
"The Marian McAlpin Show"
"The Edible Woman", a co-production between CanStage and the Vancouver Playhouse, is like a two-and-a-half hour pilot for a sitcom that never made it. Every aspect of the show-the writing, direction, the acting-is geared to show Margaret Atwood's breakthrough novel as negligible bit of 1960s fluff.
Atwood's novel, written in 1965 but not published until 1969, tells of Marian McAlpin, a young woman with friends, a lawyer for a boyfriend and a job at a consumer survey company. Her normal life begins to crumble when her boyfriend Todd asks her to marry him. She begins to drop items from her diets until she virtually stops eating. Meanwhile, she strikes up an acquaintance with angst-ridden graduate student Duncan and cannot reconcile her attraction to this hapless loser with her impending marriage. Atwood's tale proposes Marian as a woman who senses her own oppression without the benefit of a feminist movement much as Ibsen had viewed Nora of "A Doll's House" 90 years earlier. Unlike Nora who has her awakening while already trapped in a marriage with children, Marian has her awakening in time to fend off marriage.
Not all novels make good plays, especially a novel like this one where the narrator's point of view is all-important. Atwood has called the novel "anti-comic" because although Marian's world is filled with events that are humorous, Marian's alienation from them is not. In his stage version author Dave Carley has totally reversed the focus and priorities of the novel. Yes, he has Marian act as a narrator of her own story, and yes, he preserved the shift from first to third person when Marian is at her most dissociated except that this doesn't work on stage where the actor/narrator is physically present. Carley foregrounds the comic events of the book since they are the most dramatic but this simultaneously backgrounds Marian view of them. Marian's narration is adapted directly from Atwood's prose, but the dialogue veers in quality from the workmanlike in setting scenes and moving the plot from A to B to the awkward where better-known lines of the book are crammed into people's mouths regardless of how unnatural they sound. "I see myself mirrored in your eyes, small and oval", he has Marian tell Todd.
Material where point of view is all requires an expressionist adaptation or failing that an expressionist staging. The imagination for such an approach is far beyond Canadian director Timothy Bond. Since 1982 Bond has concentrated his efforts on directing television movies or series with the occasional break for the odd junk film. It's not surprising that his reference point for a script filled with comic situations should be the situation comedy. From the actors' mugging to their exaggerated gestures, staccato line delivery and deliberate pauses for laughs, he has molded Carley's script into a live sitcom with no thought as to its inappropriateness for Atwood's story.
The final point where this adaptation could be given some depth would be in the actor's performance of the play's central character. Unfortunately, Jillian Fargey as Marian seems to have modelled her interpretation on Marlo Thomas in "That Girl". She is so pert and perky throughout you would never know she was suffering from mental distress or an eating disorder until she mentions them after which she immediately bounces right back. Her line delivery and gestural repertoire like her upbeat attitude remain uniform no matter what the situation.
The rest of the cast has be judged according to how well they suit the sitcom Bond and Carley have made for them. Todd Talbot fits the bill as a stereotype, Marian's male chauvinist fiancé. Lynne Cormack does clearly distinguish her two roles as Marian's boss, the "office virgin" Lucy, and Marian's crotchety Landlady, but both are caricatures. The scenery-chewing award goes to Alec McClure as Marian's friend Len, a pseudo-British virgin-hunter. Michael Rubenfeld does nothing to suggest the obsessiveness we hear so much about in Duncan's roommate.
The only two actors able to enliven the material are Tara Samuel as Ainsley, Marian's roommate, and Darren Keay as Duncan. Although Samuel is given to stock gestures, she does succeed in making the fun-loving Ainsley into a living, breathing character with a wider range of emotion than Fargey's Marian. Keay gives Duncan such intensity he steals every scene he's in. He is perfect in portraying this scruffy character's anomie and making it a natural source of humour. Duncan is the oddest character in Atwood's novel, but due to Keay's refusal to follow the sitcom mold he becomes the most believable one in the play.
As if to reinforce the superficiality of Carley's and Bond's conception, Charlotte Dean's sets are literally two-dimensional and brightly coloured. Large panels fly down from above as if for a skit on "Laugh-In". Her costumes suit the period and the characters but I don't see why they are so exaggerated for Lucy and Landlady. Given the minimally occupied stage, Adrian Muir's lighting is unusually inventive in establishing the play's numerous changes of locale.
If you are a real fan of Atwood's novel, this production will likely cause anger and resentment. One cannot escape the fact that Carley and especially Bond have completely trivialized the book and with it its protofeminist critique. Better to reread the book than see it dumbed down. Indeed, why leave the tube if the theatre serves the same pap?
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Jillian Fargey. ©2002 CanStage.
<b> 2002-03-03</b>
<b>The Edible Woman</b>