Reviews 2003
Reviews 2003
✭✭✩✩✩
by Linda Griffiths. Directed by Simon Heath
Duchess Productions and Factory Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
January 8-February 3, 2003
Linda Griffiths' latest play Chronic focusses on Petra, a woman suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). After five years of moving from doctor to doctor, she takes a final chance with one who uses hypnotic regression to get to the root of Petra's condition.
The play falls into the mould of garrulous self-obsessed patient plays like Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1972) and Wit (1995), except that Petra is just annoyingly unwell, not dying. Griffiths' ambitions, however, go beyond that subgenre. She turns CFS into a metaphor for all the ills of the 20th century--pollution, over-reliance on technology, repressive governments, gender stereotyping, stock market speculation ... you name it. Petra becomes not a real character but a mouthpiece for Griffiths' self-indulgent invectives while the other figures serve merely as foils. The play has no forward momentum and plot arrives in Act 2 seemingly as an afterthought. Griffiths' scattershot analysis has all the depth of the psychobabble and pop science of daytime talkshows. Her self-contradictory conclusion would have us cleave to the selves we were at age 12 and yet somehow conquer this all-pervasive illness by accepting it.
The cast does as well as they can to fill in Griffiths' sketchy outlines. But even the usually superb Caroline Gillis can't make Petra into a fully rounded much less interesting character. Eric Peterson's limber, oversexed Virus gives the show some spark. The greatest success, however, is David Boechler's ingenious set of great circular bed-cum-web design office backed by a luminous, permeable cell wall. The play does have an effect. After Act 1, you'll feel you, too, have developed CFS.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2003-01-16.
Photo: J.D. Nicholsen, Caroline Gillis & Brooke Johnson. ©2003 Nir Baraket.
2003-01-16
Chronic