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written by Jennifer Tremblay, directed by Kelly Thornton

Nightwood Theatre, Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto

October 14-November 6, 2010

The List by Québecois playwright Jennifer Tremblay (no relation to Michel) won the Governor General’s Award for French drama in 2008.  It must have been a very weak year.  The play is so mind-bogglingly trivial it seems to last much longer than its 75 minutes.  

The premise of this one-person play is that a Woman (Allegra Fulton) is convinced that she has caused the death of her friend Caroline.  The Woman and her husband have moved from the city to a small village in the country because the Woman believed she would have more time with him, ignorant that now he would spend more time commuting.  She is obsessive-compulsive to the point of psychological disorder, wiping any minor spill and dating her three children’s drawings to store in numbered boxes.  Every day she makes detailed “to do” lists of all activities no matter how minor.  She prefers to remain in the confines of her house, which she can control, rather than venture into the outside world, which she cannot.  Her one excursion outside led to meeting Caroline, a messy, life-loving mother of four and in every way the Woman’s opposite.  Caroline makes one simple request that the Woman puts on her list but never gets around to doing.  That, she thinks, led to Caroline’s death.  Tremblay seems not to have done her medical homework.  No medical procedure is risk-free.  Caroline dies due to a known risk in blood transfusions, a transfusion-related acute lung injury or TRALI, that happens in 1 in 5000 cases, of which 10% are fatal.  Thus, the death has nothing to do with Caroline’s doctor and even less with the Woman.  Had Tremblay known this, she might have presented the Woman’s feelings of guilt and her obsession with Caroline’s death as part of the Woman’s deteriorating mental condition.  Sadly, she does not.

Fulton presents the Woman as brunette Martha Stewart but without the slickness or faux-country patina.  Fulton is best when Tremblay allows her some humour.  The point, however, is to show that Woman’s obsession is spiralling out of control.  Why else would Thornton show the fridge full of only apples and home-made applesauce?  If so, then Fulton seems too busy conveying various moods in her story to suggest the Woman’s underlying mania.  Critics who see something universal in the Woman and how her self-absorption leads to a death, forget that Tremblay clearly emphasizes how atypical the Woman is in her mania.  Denyse Karn’s spotless, all-white kitchen perfectly captures the Woman’s personality but also, inadvertently, shows us nothing’s there.  Karn’s use of projections are more interesting than the text they’re meant to illustrate.  If you’re looking to spend 75 minutes in a working kitchen with agoraphobic women, you’ll find much more excitement with the vital, vindictive, poetry-spewing homebodies of The New Electric Ballroom, now at the Tarragon, than with the superficial neat freak of The List.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-10-15.

Photo: Allegra Fulton. ©Robert Popkin.