Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✩✩✩
by Stephen Baetz, directed by Leslie O’Dell
Red Socks Company, Young Centre, Toronto
November 2-10, 2007
Stephen Baetz’s No Good Reason, now receiving its Toronto premiere, is an earnest, well-meaning but rather dull play presented in a handsome production. Set in 1918 on the terrace of a military convalescence hospital, well designed by Eric Bunnell, we meet two soldiers recovering from their wounds. Sam Brook (Mark McGrinder) can’t walk and Will Dunn (Christopher Stanton) has shell shock. The point of the action is spelled out in the program: “As they struggle to mend, they discover that the only possible bridge to recovery lies in helping someone else.” Optimistic as this sentiment is, it is so general that one is tempted to respond, “So what?”
Part of the problem of the play is that making the two men become friends is more important to the playwright than the logic of the characters’ actions. First, Baetz makes Sam outgoing, talkative and positively aggressive in trying to draw out personal details from the mentally detached Will. Yet, as we discover, Sam has a number of secrets to hide, one of which would get him turned out of the hospital. Such a person more probably would want to call as little attention to himself as possible and Sam comes off as rather dim-witted when he objects to Will’s grilling him about his own past. Where did Sam think his probing into Will’s life was going to lead?
Second, Baetz portrays Will initially as so severely shell-shocked (or subject, as we would now say, to post-traumatic stress disorder) that it seems more likely Sam’s pestering would aggravate rather than overcome Will’s protective asocial behaviour. Then when Will lapses into “normality,” Baetz and director Leslie O’Dell make him so fun-loving that they lose sight of the underlying strain of his trauma. Finally, the conclusion makes little sense. If Will is as obsessed with rules and order as Baetz portrays him, he ought not continue to help Sam since doing so would get himself into trouble. Though Baetz glosses over it, the ending of the play actually provides more fertile ground for dramatic conflict than does the beginning.
Both McGrinder and Stanton do the best they can with the material. All the talk of girlfriends and battles is so generalized and clichéd that it is only what both actors inject into the roles that gives them any personality. Even then it’s hard to say we really get to know either one. Kudos to lighting designer Sandra Marcroftand sound designer Todd Charlton for making Will’s flashbacks to the battlefield so effective. If only Baetz’s portrayal of the war trauma of his two soldiers were as compelling, we might actually care more about them.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-11-06.
Photo: Chris Stanton and Mark McGrinder. ©Eric Bunnell.
2007-11-06
No Good Reason