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by Sally Clark, directed by Katherine Bethell

Entertainment by Demand, Alchemy Theatre, Toronto

December 6-15, 2007

Inside Canadian playwright Sally Clark’s Lost Souls and Missing Persons from 1984 is a fascinating play struggling to get out.  Clark, however, has virtually bound and gagged that better play with the messy structure and confused point of view of the actual play she has written.  Lost Souls abounds in unnecessary characters and scenes.  It has monologues of overheard thoughts and travels back and forth in time.  It has a relentlessly tedious would-be comic subplot that does nothing more than pad the action to a two-hour length.  Worst of all, Clark hasn’t decided whether she is treating her subject satirically or seriously.  This indecisiveness of tone both in the play and in Katherine Bethell’s direction means we never really care about the characters or what happens to them.

On holiday in New York one morning, Lyle (Mark McIntyre) wakes up to find Hannah (Kaitlyn Regehr), his wife of many years, missing.  As his search for her goes nowhere, flashbacks show us the lives of the two before and after marriage.  Unbeknownst to Lyle, Hannah has suddenly forgotten her past life and the ability to speak and now wanders the streets like a homeless woman muttering gibberish.  Turner (Jay McCarrol), an artist, tries to help Hannah out and eventually falls in love with his little “zombie” as he calls her.  This is really all the story Clark needs.  From an old-fashioned feminist perspective, Hannah loses her identity in becoming a wife and mother.  No matter how different Lyle and Turner are, they both regard Hannah not as a person but as an incoherent, discardable automaton useful only for lovemaking.  Unfortunately, Clark has mixed in a lengthy parallel plot in which the obnoxious Mrs. Cape (Kathleen Jackson) drags her idiot son Nesbitt (Johnnie Walker) abound New York in search of her missing husband.

Though the cast is very uneven the actors playing the three central characters are strong.  Regehr plays Hannah with sympathy and humour.  She is able to switch in a moment from the good little wife to the bag lady to earlier versions of herself and back with precision and clarity.  If only the playwright and director had viewed Hannah’s traumatic amnesia and regression more seriously, so would we.  McIntyre is effective because he never exaggerates his character.  His Lyle is interestingly both weak and egocentric, a man who marries because it’s the thing to do but can’t even describe what his wife looks like.  McCarrol’s Turner is loopy enough that we can almost, though not entirely, believe he would fall for a babbling, foul-smelling streetperson.  Jackson makes Mrs. Cape only too unbearable with an ear-grating voice, painful accent and such egregious overacting you wish live theatre had a mute button.  Her performance makes you wish all the more that you could see Regehr, McIntyre and McCarrol alone together in another, better written play.           

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-12-07.

Photo: Poster for Lost Souls and Missing Persons. ©2007 Alchemy Theatre.