Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✭✩✩
by David French, directed by Ted Dykstra
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
January 10-31, 2008
Soulpepper has followed its highly successful production of Leaving Home, (1972) David French first play in the Mercer family saga, with Salt-Water Moon (1984), the prequel to it where we see the parents of Leaving Home as they were when they were teenagers. If Leaving Home was an old-fashioned play about an old-fashioned subject, Salt-Water Moon is even more old-fashioned and less original. It has basically the same set-up and outcome as American playwright Lanford Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Talley’s Folly (1979), also a prequel and part of his Tally family trilogy. Both are 90-minute two-person plays set at night in a small town while everyone else is otherwise preoccupied--with a wake in French, with July 4th in Wilson. In both a man has returned after a year’s absence determined to win over the girl he left behind. The shadow of World War II hangs over Wilson’s play, World War I over French’s. French’s play is about the sheer bravado of Jacob (Jeff Lillico) in winning over Mary (Krystin Pellerin), who seems to have become engaged to someone else just to spite him. In Wilson, the couple is divided by religion, class, age and most of all by painful secrets each feels will nullify the possibility for love. With so much more subtext, Wilson’s is the richer play.
Nevertheless, Salt-Water Moon can be still charming if performed with sufficient vitality. In Soulpepper’s production only Lillico is in top form. He shows us all the wiliness, stubbornness and cutting wit we saw in Kenneth Welsh’s older Jacob last year. Lillico also gives us a façade of cocksureness both reinforced and marred by rage at past injustices. It is a beautifully judged performance by one of our finest younger actors. What he needs is an actor as powerful as he is to stand up to him. That Pellerin cannot do. She delivers all her lines with the same unvarying intonation of anger so that we can’t understand what Jacob sees in her or trace, as we should, the subtle changes in her attitude toward him that would give her character depth and make the verbal wrangling between the two intriguing. The show should feel like a duel. Instead, it’s as if Jacob were beating sword against a wall. Victoria Wallace’s design is lovely and so is Leigh Ann Vardy’s lighting. Yet, without two equals to do battle, this already lesser work feels, like so many prequels do, unnecessary.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-01-14.
Photo: Krystin Pellerin and Jeff Lillico. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2008-01-14
Salt-Water Moon