✭✭✭✭✩

by Brett C. Leonard, directed by Glen Gaston

Column 13 Actors Company, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto

March 2-12, 2011

Column 13, a brave independent theatre company, seems drawn to gritty new American plays that have moved past bemoaning the loss of the American dream to depicting the death spiral of those for whom it never existed.  Brett C. Leonard’s The Long Red Road is one such powerful play.  It premiered in Chicago just last year directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Column 13’s is its second production.

In many American plays the family is a microcosm of the nation.  Here Leonard depicts a family fatally divided against itself.  The alcoholic Sammy (Brandon Thomas in a harrowing portrait of pain and self-loathing) has fled the scene of a tragic accident nine years ago and left his older brother Bob (Jonah Allison, frightening as a character seething with rage and lust) in charge of his injured wife Sandra (Meghan McNicol, brittle with anger) and rebellious daughter Tasha (Bronwyn Caudle, who suggests hidden depths in this teenager from the start).  Sammy has sought sanctuary in a Lakota reserve in South Dakota, where he finds schoolteacher Annie (Angela Hanes in a painfully believable performance), one of those women fated to try to save self-destructive men from themselves.

Leonard underscores the family’s division by completely separating scenes with Sammy from those with Bob and cutting between them.  He thus forces us to make all the connections between the two until the end of Act 1.  Those used to neat exposition will find this technique difficult, but it pays off in setting up Sammy and Bob as two forces whose meeting can only lead to disaster.  The “long red road” of the title is the path of sobriety a man needs to follow, as explained by Native bartender Clifton (Caleb Verzyden, a strong presence on stage).  Clifton is proud to have stayed along that path, but the drunkenness that plagues Sammy and Bob is more than alcoholism.  It is their incendiary mixture of hatred and self-hatred that makes both feel worthless and leads Bob to harm others and Sammy to self-destruction.  Leonard paints an uncompromisingly bleak picture of 21st-century America, but it’s one that needs to be seen. 

Column 13 brought Toronto the plays by Stephen Adly Guirgis no one else would.  Now with Unconditional in 2008 and the present play, it is bringing us new work by Guirgis’s fellow LAByrinth Theater member.  Again, Toronto owes Column 13 a debt of thanks for daring to stage plays of such complexity and emotional force and to do so with such focus and passion.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2011-03-07.

Photo: Jonah Allison, Meghan McNicol and Bronwyn Caudle. ©Anna Treusch.