Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✭✩
written and directed by Daniel MacIvor
Tarragon Theatre, Toronto
March 3-April 4, 2010
Communion, now having its world premiere at the Tarragon Theatre, is a fascinating but very different Daniel MacIvor play. Gone are the horror, violence and convolutions of time. Where previous MacIvor characters have been only too able to create images of themselves through storytelling, in Communion characters struggle to find the story that explains who they are.
The 80-minute play has an elegant three-scene structure in which we see each of the three characters twice in two contrasting situations. We first meet Leda (Caroline Gillis) in one of her weekly sessions with her therapist Carolyn (Sarah Dodd). Leda is a reformed alcoholic with an important message to tell her daughter Ann (Athena Lamarre), who now lives with Leda’s ex-husband and his new wife. This has stopped communication between mother and daughter along with Ann’s joining an ultra-fundamentalist Christian community. Breaking her own rule, Carolyn gives Leda the direct advice to visit Ann, an action with unexpected consequences. The title refers to both the general sharing of thoughts and feelings that the characters long for as well as the Christian sacrament symbolizing union with Christ and with other believers.
MacIvor’s direction and Kimberly Purtell’s design have a beautiful simplicity. Gillis creates an intensely detailed portrait of a woman whose life is crumbling around her but who manages to pull herself together for a dignified meeting with her daughter. In an outstanding performance, newcomer Lamarre makes the formerly free-spirited, now rigidly orthodox Ann totally believable, clearly suggesting that her conversion is a channel for her anger. Dodd masterfully shows that beneath the therapist’s professional restraint lies a real compassion for her client. Each character presents a contradiction. Each suffers because she believes she is alone yet tries to fend off others who offer help. MacIvor suggests that human lives are far more interconnected than individuals are willing to acknowledge. Communion does not have the immediate visceral impact of MacIvor’s other work. Instead he creates a play where we must gradually piece together the characters’ journeys and the multiple implications of his theme. Since Communion is the second part of a trilogy referencing MacIvor’s Roman Catholic upbringing, let’s hope Tarragon brings us the first and third parts to help us place this part in context.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-03-04.
Photo: Bethany jillard, Caroline Gillis and Sarah Dodd. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2010-03-04
Communion