Reviews 2006
Reviews 2006
✭✭✭✩✩
by Diane Flacks and Richard Greenblatt,
directed by Eda Holmes
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
May 28, 2006
After their big hit Sibs (2000), Diane Flacks’s and Richard Greenblatt’s new play Care comes as a disappointment. The topic is the pressure on young couples to care for their babies as well as their aged parents, but the show comes off more as a series of sketches than a real play and the duo’s insights are hardly original.
Flacks plays Ellie, whose career is on hold while she brings up her one-year-old. Greenblatt is her husband Steve, under stress to succeed at work and to resist having an affair with a seductive female client. The couple’s problems with sleep-deprivation, job and marital anxieties and arguments over child-rearing methods all seem rather tired. What works best are the sequences involving Ellie’s crotchety, cancer-ridden father (also Greenblatt) and the series of volunteer women (all played by Flacks) who look after him. Flacks is marvelous in switching identities from an older Jewish lady to a born-again Christian to a mysterious Eastern-European woman to a dippy would-be actress. Greenblatt plays Ellie’s father with a mixture of humour and pathos. It’s too bad Care doesn’t keep the focus on these characters instead of the annoyingly self-centred Steve and Ellie.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2006-05-04.
Photo: Richard Greenblatt and Diane Flacks. ©2006 Cylla von Tiedemann.
2006-05-04
Care