✭✭✭✩✩

by Layne Coleman, directed by Ashlie Corcoran

Theatre Smash, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto

March 11-28, 2009

In 2000 novelist-journalist Carole Corbeil died of ovarian cancer.  Her husband Layne Coleman, former Artistic Director of Theatre Passe Muraille, had written an autobiographical short story of his and his wife’s last ditch effort to find a cure for his wife’s cancer at a Mexican clinic.  He worked with actor Ieva Lucs and director Ashlie Corcoran to bring this story to the stage.  In 2007 both the story called “Oasis of Hope” was published and the play called “Tijuana Cure” appeared at the the SummerWorks Festival.  The sad aspect about this play born from real grief and pain is that it is not very engaging.  It seems to bear out Oscar Wilde’s statement that "In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing."

Lucs plays the narrator called “Layne” and about fifteen other characters including Carole.  The gender-difference is used as a distancing device and causes no problems, especially since the majority of the other characters are female.  The paradox is that while Lucs beautifully captures Carole’s quiet centredness and instantly conveys the idiosyncrasies of so many others in their fleeting  appearances, she never seems to get a hold on “Layne.”  Limbs flailing and rapidly inhaling before every speech, her “Layne” comes across as a gawky teenager, not the suffering 50-year-old he is supposed to be.  Since Lucs is so adept at embodying everyone else, the source of the problem is Coleman’s writing.  He has neglected to define himself as a character.  Showing himself as a man married to a dying wife and undergoing a midlife crisis is not specific enough.  Though his account of his trip to Tijuana and back is punctuated with flashbacks of his trysts with other women, they are solely about sex not growth of character.  

Too late in the hour-long show, “Layne” notices that his deification of his dying wife brings out the urge in him to react against his strict religious upbringing.  This, his single most insightful statement, belies the cliché of his midlife crisis and could have made a good starting point in exploring the narrator’s internal conflicts.  An acknowledgement that both know this journey is futile would help give it depth.  Instead, all we get are an unfocussed series of generalized observations, neither acute nor witty, on the discomfort of travelling, overused time-markers like the Beatles’ Ed Sullivan appearance and the moon landing, leers at passing hot female asses and repetitions that “Layne” loves Carole.  Were it not for the magically changing atmosphere on the bare stage created by Jason Hand’s inventive lighting and the energetic, totally committed performance of Lucs, Tijuana Cure would itself be a wasted journey. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-03-12.

Photo: Ieva Lucs. ©Martha Haldenby.