Reviews 2002
Reviews 2002
✭✭✩✩✩ / ✭✭✩✩✩
by Celia McBride, directed by Michael Shamata /
by Timothy Findley, directed by Dennis Garnhum
Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford
August 24-September 15, 2002
"Two Scant Servings"
The third double-bill at Stratford's new Studio Theatre is not as ill-suited a pair was the second double-bill. Unlike the second pair, some actors appear in both plays and both feature a common image, a central scene around a dinner table. Both plays are better acted than the previous pair, but this only reveals what insubstantial pieces they both are.
First on the bill is "Walk Right Up" by Montreal-based playwright Celia McBride. The focus is the difficulties the Ruskin family faces after the father has suffered a debilitating stroke an the mother begins showing signs of dementia. An actor daughter Poet has been taking care of the parents in their cottage, but now she has to go away to make a movie and expects her older sister Ella to take over. Ella is too busy with her job and has invited their drug-addled brother Brilliant (must be ironic) to take over. Fights flare up among all concerned until Brilliant leaves when he can't get any more money for drugs from Ella. At dinner more fights break out. Though the elder Ruskins, Millar and Lily, won't move out of their cottage and won't accept home care either, McBride sides with Poet and has Ella come to realize that she should take care of them. The mother is allowed to speak the moral of the play as the last line: "We all need help".
Yes, and so does the playwright. The writing never rises to the level of a movie-of-the-week except in Brilliant's disconnected speeches. The family tensions are so broadly signalled and turn out to be so clichéd that they arouse no interest. If often seems as if the point is to provide useful instruction in the care stroke patients instead of telling a story. McBride assumes we agree that the parents are right to refuse both home care and a nursing home, when one or the other is the sensible option. It also doesn't seem to bother McBride that Ella's conversion comes about as the result of emotional blackmail from a stunt the father pulls when he tries to walk and, of course, falls down creating a scene.
The play is generally well acted. Brenda Robins's committed performance as Ella is much better than the material itself. Kimwun Perehinec as Poet sounds the same tone of complaint throughout but then her character's nickname is "Pill". Paul Soles communicates the gruff spirit of Millar while physically convincing as a stroke victim paralyzed on one side. The show's main liability is Elizabeth Shepherd, who gives all Lily's lines the same overemphatic delivery. The mother is supposed to be annoying but not monotonous. The show's main surprise is Damien Atkins, who provides a sudden energy boost as Brilliant. He gives a performance both hilarious and troubling as someone whose brain has been so fried by drugs he is barely coherent.
Director Michael Shamata gives the work a respectful reading but can't disguise its longueurs and creaky hinges. The show is only one hour and fifteen minutes long but feels like more than twice that.
The second play on the bill is Timothy Findley's "Shadows". Findley died two months before it opened. It would be nice to report that what is now his last play is a masterpiece. Instead it turns out to be a rather heavy-handed theatrical joke and not an original one at that.
Playwright Ben Singer and his wife Shelagh have invited four guests, two old friends, two newcomers, for a party during a total lunar eclipse. The usual postprandial amusement at the Singers is a game called "Storytime", in which the diners must tell some painful truth about themselves or at least make it sound like a truth. Predictably, dark secrets are revealed, recriminations are hurled, the newcomers want to leave. When the guests unaccountably treat lightly the reported death of a newcomer's friend in a plane crash, we begin to wonder how tasteless this cross between "The Boys in the Band" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is going to be.
Ah, but Findley has a grander theme in mind. Ben suddenly refers to us, the audience, the house lights go up and the actors begin to mingle. Ben informs us that nothing we have witnessed so far is real (no?), there was no lunar eclipse (yikes!) and the actors are not who they said they were (gasp!). Rather the five joining him at the table are playwrights competing to tell the most convincing story or, to quote, "six playwrights in search of a commission". The one who wins will have his/her play produced at the Festival Theatre. The five then tell us different fictions to explain who they "really" are. After this Ben reveals to us, "Lies. That's what the theatre is made of."
As the allusion to "Six Characters in Search of an Author" makes painfully clear, Findley is attempting to write a play in the mode of Pirandello. Unfortunately, he can't think of any original way to begin it except for a now-hackneyed truth or dare game and his conclusion is nothing but a paraphrase of the conclusion of "Six Characters". At least, Findley acknowledges his source, but he clearly has nothing new to add to it. When Ben announces to the audience what has "really" been going on during the dinner scene, that explanation doesn't fit what we've seen. Findley has not been clever enough to write that first scene so that, in retrospect, it supports this new interpretation. Rather than a revelation, it comes off as just a trick.
That said, the show is very well acted. It good to see Brent Carver play a nasty character for a change, making Ben a sadistically manipulative egotist. Brenda Robins lends dignity and poise to Ben's wife Shelagh. Karen Robinson gives humour and passion to Lily, a actress and Ben's former lover. Stephen Ouimette has little to do but appear sullen as a gay actor and another of Ben's former lovers. Chick Reid exudes cool as the lesbian designer Kate. Gordon Rand is suitably lumpish as the randy photographer Owen. And Kimwun Perehinec, in the best of her three performances at the Studio, gives us a dumb brunette, Meredith, whose naiveté is deceiving.
Director Dennis Garnhum has caught the atmosphere of tension rising beneath the surface camaraderie very well. He has created such a fine mood the break into "reality" is harsh. Lorenzo Savoini, Joanne Dente and Ereca Hassel are responsible, respectively, for the set, costumes and lighting for both shows, each far more successful with "Shadows", where mood is more important and the characters more colourful, than in "Walk Right Up".
Both shows end with an in-case-you-didn't-get-it speech telling us the moral of the play, as if the preceding events where so complex the writers feared they were beyond us. In both cases the works are unoriginal and the "moral" embarrassingly obvious. Anyone who sees much theatre in Toronto will know that the best new Canadian work is not like this. The question is why does the programmer of the Studio Theatre season think it is?
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Programme covers for Walk Right Up and Shadows. ©2002 Stratford Festival.
2002-09-09
Walk Right Up / Shadows