✭✭✭✩✩
<b>by Diane Flacks and Richard Greenblatt,
directed by Eda Holmes
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
May 28, 2006
</b>
After their big hit <i>Sibs</i> (2000), Diane Flacks’s and Richard Greenblatt’s new play <i>Care</i> 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 <i>Care</i> 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 <i>Eye Weekly</i> 2006-05-04.
Photo: Richard Greenblatt and Diane Flacks. ©2006 Cylla von Tiedemann.
<b>2006-05-04</b>
<b>Care</b>