Reviews 2006
Reviews 2006
✭✭✭✩✩
by Vern Thiessen, directed by Ken Gass
Factory Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
October 14-November 12, 2006
Apple is one of those curious shows where the production is actually more interesting than the play itself. An excellent cast, fascinating set and lighting design and incisive direction are lavished on Albertan Vern Thiessen’s 2002 play which on its own is rather like a disease-of-the-week television movie script with delusions of grandeur.
Evelyn (Sarah Orenstein) plays the now-clichéd role of the feisty, ambitious career woman struck down by cancer and going through the Kübler-Ross Five Stages of Grief. Thiessen’s twist on the pattern is that Evelyn’s unemployed husband Andy (Kevin Hanchard) is having an affair with a medical student Samantha (Niki Landau), who later happens to be assigned to Evelyn’s treatment. The flaws in the play are fairly obvious. The plot depends too much on coincidence, Thiessen uses Andy periodically as poetic narrator when none is needed and Thiessen punctuates the action with Samantha’s lectures on cancer to reinforce his bizarre metaphor that cancer cells “test the fidelity” of those around them, thus seemingly making Samantha who initiates the affair into a kind of cancer on Andy and Evelyn’s relationship.
Despite all this, Orenstein and Hanchard gives performances of such commitment and intensity they are worth seeing for their own sake while Landau does her best with the impossible task of uniting the roles of femme fatale and grieving daughter into one character.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2006-10-26.
Photo: Sarah Orenstein and Kevin Hanchard.
2006-10-26
Apple