✭✭✭✭✩ / ✭✭✭✩✩

by Paul Dunn, directed by Richard Monette /

by Anton Piatigorsky, directed by Andrey Tarasiuk

Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford

July 13-August 10, 2002

"Studio Theatre's Mixed Programme"

On July 13 as part of Stratford's celebrations for its 50th season, Governor General Adrienne Clarkson officially opened the Stratford's fourth stage, the Studio Theatre.  If the space itself is not as pleasant as one might have hoped, Stratford at least has a small-scale venue of its own to showcase new, risky or more obscure dramatic works.

Built in what used to be the scene shop behind the Avon Theatre with its entrance at the corner of George and Waterloo Streets, the Studio seats only 250.  The stage is in the shape of the famous thrust stage of  the Festival Theatre and includes staircases behind it to a balcony.  It is not raised.  To fit into the narrow space available the seats are steeply raked not unlike the stadium seating one finds in new cineplexes.  Stadium seating is fine when the audience is meant to be staring straight ahead at an image on the wall, but here the action is on the floor.  From the majority of the seats one has to look down on the action.  I was in only the fifth row and felt as if I were in a balcony.  Since the Festival already has two theatres with thrust stages,  I wonder if it would not have been better to have built a more conventional black box theatre that would have allowed a gentler rise in the seating.

The play that opened the Studio Theatre was "High-Gravel-Blind" by present company member Paul Dunn.  The words in the title, never mentioned in the play, come from "The Merchant of Venice", Act 2, Scene 2, where Old Gobbo does not recognize his own son Launcelot, who to "try confusions" with him telling him his son is dead.  Launcelot says that his father "being more than sand-blind, high-gravel-blind, knows me not."  Dunn played Launcelot in "Merchant" last year and the experience has clearly inspired his modern version of the situation. 

Lance (viz. Launcelot) is living in Montreal with sculptor Jessica.  Both twentysomethings were once on the street, but Jessica's art now supplies enough income for both since hapless Lance has yet again failed bartending school.  In a forced bit of symbolic action, the two put on masks Jessica has made.  The effect on the homosexual Lance is to bring out aggressive sexual advances toward Jessica.  In the next scene Lance has suddenly struck it rich having been hired by a soap star to be his personal assistant.  Lance revels in the thought that now he can start anew and leave the past behind when the doorbell rings.  There is his father Gord and his new wife Margery.  They have come from Calgary to attend a Christian conference in Montreal and Gord has decided to look up the son he hasn't seen since the boy way eight.  Lance blurts out that Lance is dead.  The remainder of the 75-minutes is taken up with the attempts of Lance, now "Bob", and Jessica to keep up this charade while stricken Gord and inquisitive Margery ask ever more personal questions to understand the son they have lost.

Though the show does not fully avoid the feel of a sitcom, it is genuinely funny and builds in humour  until the inevitable discovery of the truth.  The middle section of the foursome's conversation treads water a bit when Dunn overuses the technique of one character repeating the final word of another character's speech to prompt a further speech, a lame technique to make a monologue seem like dialogue. 

The show is well cast.  Damien Atkins is right at home as the flamboyant Lance, making perfect sense of his abrupt swings from bravado to insecurity.  Kimwun Perehinec captures the loopiness of Jessica though the whining tone she adopts soon becomes tiresome.  Stephen Ouimette is excellent as the taciturn Gord,  who as a reformed alcoholic and reaffirmed Christian is, like his son, also trying to put his past behind him.  It is Chick Reid, however, who really steals the show as Margery, a woman addicted to verbalizing her every thought.  Margery is the one who has reformed Gord and continues in the role of trainer while pretending he is the one with authority.  She makes the rich vein of narrow-minded Calgarian in the sin city of Montreal seem to derive from character instead of stereotype.  Her performance as Margery becomes increasing more outspoken the more she drinks, while enforcing a ban on alcohol for Gord, is priceless. 

Director Richard Monette has given the work just the right pacing.  He makes the most of the work's humour without exaggeration and is sensitive to the undercurrent of loss in the characters of Lance and Gord.  Lorenzo Savoini has designed the appropriately low-rent apartment for Jessica.  Joanne Dente has designed the costumes with especial comic pertinence for the uptight Margery.  And Robert Thomson provides the effective lighting. 

"High-Gravel-Blind" is a play that will likely go on to more success elsewhere, especially if it is paired with an equally effective one-acter.  That appropriate companion piece is definitely not "Eternal Hydra" by Anton Piatigorsky that followed Dunn's play and successfully dampened the mood of the opening day audience. 

Though only 90 minutes long, it feels like more than twice that length.  It is constructed more to exemplify certain dogmas of current literary theory than to create any authentic dramatic action.  We can be sure we live in a time that has moved beyond the vapidity of postmodernism when we encounter a play like this that so uncritically promotes it as the ne plus ultra of literary endeavour.

The play is divided into two parts.  In the first we meet the scholar Vivian Ezra, who has discovered the lost manuscript of "Eternal Hydra", the supposed masterpiece that (fictional) Irish modernist author Gordias Carbuncle wrote in Paris in the 1930s.  Vivian also rather annoyingly narrates the action including "He said" and "She said" and has conversations with the spirit of Carbuncle, whom only we and she can see.  She goes to  Randall Wellington Jr., the son of Carbuncle's patron in Paris, hoping he will publish the work.  He counters that the present publishing climate will prevent him from doing so since the market for a 999-page work of Joycean difficulty is not large enough.  After much abstract debate on the topic of business versus art, Wellington invites best-selling author Pauline Newberry to meet Vivian.  Newberry has just written a novel about (fictional) black author Selma Thomas in 1930s Paris in which Carbuncle is a minor character.  Piatigorsky gives us a narration within a narration as Pauline proceeds to read a passage of an encounter between Selma and Gordias, Vivian objecting all the while to the portrayal of her hero.  Finally, it is decided that Vivian will write an introduction to Pauline's book to create interest him and that Wellington will publish Carbuncle's magnum opus.

Many at the opening assumed that this was the conclusion, but no, Piatigorsky has more to his plodding agenda.  Part two shows us the "real" Carbuncle in the Paris of 1936.  We see the real encounter between Carbuncle and Selma as well as with his researcher Gwendolyn and his publisher Wellington Sr.  Piatigorsky's point is the same one that Stoppard makes much more elegantly in "Indian Ink" (1991)--that people's imaginings or recreations of the past are no more than that.  The truth may be completely different and ultimately is hidden.

"Eternal Hydra" is erudite and would be theoretically intriguing if novels like A.S. Byatt's "Possession" (1990) or many of Stoppard's plays had not already covered the same ground for more than a decade and with more liveliness and wit.  The play is tedious because the situations are not dramatic.  Piatigorsky assumes from the start that we are interested in Vivian's endeavour even though it's impossible to get excited about a work only vaguely described and a character we know nothing of.  Debates are presented as debates on topics like the appropriation of voice, cultural construction, essentialism and the dumbing-down of culture while what action there is stops dead.  Piatigorsky also can't make an allusion without underlining it and providing a gloss.

The excellence of the cast only shows up the turgidity of the content.  Stephen Ouimette captures sense of a man who has created a fictional identity for himself of slightly roué gentility that doesn't quite hide his humble origins.  Chick Reid gives as much vivacity as she can to Vivian and Gwendolyn but can't galvanize a lifeless play on her own.  Paul Soles has the uninteresting roles of Wellington Jr. and Sr. and does little with them.  It is Karen Robinson who injects the most vitality into the play both as Pauline and as Selma, finely distinguishing between the two and finding more detail in them than Piatigorsky provides.

Director Andrey Tarasiuk does not help matters with his torpid pace.  Lorenzo Savoini's minimal set of a desk and two chairs requires Robert Thomson's dusky lighting to create mood.  Joanne Dente has designed attractive costumes that clearly contrast the two historical settings. 

The opening double-bill at the Studio Theatre, the first of three, highlights the flaw in presenting double-bills instead of single shows with separate admissions.  If both one-acters are good, there is no problem, but as here where one is recommendable and the other is not, the bad one will drag down the good with it.  Who will pay the $50.00 the Festival is charging, higher than any alternative show in Toronto, to see only one of two shows?  Far better to lower the price and charge separately for each show.  Then the experiments with promise like Dunn's won't be tied to those that do not.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Programme covers for High-Gravel Blind and Eternal Hydra. ©2002 Stratford Festival.