✭✭✭✭✩

by Jon Fosse, directed by Cynthia Ashperger

Play Inc., Alley Theatre Workshop, Toronto

October 12-November 7, 2009

Is Toronto acquiring a taste for Jon Fosse?  A Summer’s Day (1999), the work’s Canadian premiere, is the second production of a Fosse play this year.  The 50-year-old Norwegian playwright, frequently performed in Europe, is barely known in North America.  If you missed One Little Goat’s production of Fosse’s Someone Is Going to Come last March, Play Inc.’s A Summer’s Day would make an excellent introduction to a man who has carried on the tradition of Beckett and Pinter in his own distinctive way.

Fosse uses extensive repetition and an extremely reduced vocabulary to represent the inadequacy of language in the face of the surrounding void that renders it and existence itself meaningless.  Thus, characters in A Summer’s Day hold on to simple words like “window,” “boat,” “waves,” “darkness,” in a vain attempt to make sense of their world.  The plot itself is simple.  The visit of an Elderly Friend (Lara Arabian) to an Elderly Woman (Cynthia Ashperger) sparks the memory of the Friend’s first visit to the house when the Woman’s husband Asle (Dylan Smith) left to brood on his boat in the fjord and never returned.  Asle’s disappearance and the Woman’s petrifaction into a state unfulfillable hope make this a double tragedy.

Ashperger has had the brilliant insight to recognize how similar Fosse’s memory play is to Japanese Noh plays in which characters are compelled to re-enact the memories that forever imprison them.  Here, Ashperger uses beautiful, handcrafted Balinese masks for the Elderly Woman, Elderly Friend and others, who have reached a state of immutability, to set them apart from their younger unmasked selves when change was still possible.  As an performer Ashperger clearly distinguishes the ritualistic acting style of the Elderly Woman from the naturalistic style of her younger self while maintaining unabating intensity in both.  Smith is excellent is conveying the depths of depression that have engulfed an ordinary man.  Arabian and Michael Kash, as the Friend’s Husband, fully convey the pain of innocents drawn into the tragedy of others.  As a director Ashperger brings out both the poetry and the unbearable tension of a nightmare playing out in slow motion. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-10-23.

Photo: Cynthia Ashperger and Dylan Smith. ©Robert J. Brodey.