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by Jules Lewis, directed by Nigel Shawn Williams

Rooftop Creations, Next Stage Festival, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto

January 4-15, 2012

Tomasso’s Party provides intriguing evidence that new Canadian playwrights are seeking inspiration in the work of older Canadian playwrights.  Jules Lewis’s play seems particularly indebted to Morris Panych’s Vigil (1995).  Although the relation of Hugo to Madeleine in Lewis’s play completely different from that of Kemp to Grace in Panych’s, both two-character plays feature a young, neurotic male to spends the majority of the action berating a mostly mute woman lying in bed only to receive an unexpected comeuppance at the end.

While Kemp becomes increasing frustrated that his supposedly dying aunt does not seem to be dying at all, Lewis’s Hugo (Simon Bracken), much to the play’s detriment, has no motivation for his actions.  Initially, Hugo wakes up because he can’t remember the title of a book Tomasso has written.  Lewis pursues that notion on and off for about half the playing time and then drops it.  Hugo then wants Madeleine (Leah Doz), who has been in bed with him to turn around, because he’s had only her back to study during his sleepless hours.  She won’t oblige because she’s sleeping.  It may be funny a few times to have a sleeping person proclaim aloud that she’s sleeping, but Madeleine’s responses to Hugo’s pointless barrage of questions is so selective that it makes the entire play patently artificial. 

There is no unity to Hugo’s character.  He asserts that Tomasso, Madeleine’s boss, is gay, but when she says he isn’t, Hugo immediately assumes she’s having an affair with him.  At least, Lewis has devised a truth Hugo must face that is even worse than anything his muddled brain can imagine. 

If the point of Hugo, like so many of Panych’s male motormouth characters is to be annoying, Bracken fully succeeds.  He looks like Franz Kafka and speaks nearly all his lines like Peter Lorre shouting between clenched teeth.  Only when he calms down near then does he speak with any nuance.  Setting aside the our disbelief that Madeleine can converse when she likes yet still be asleep, Doz gives an excellent performance.  She has even greater strictures placed on her than Panych places on Grace.  At least we get to see the mostly silent Grace’s face.  Lewis allows us to see only Madeleine’s back, the back of her head and one arm.  Director Nigel Shawn Williams coaxes just about as much expression as possible from Doz’s languid voice, that fluid arm and those pert fingers.

As with Panych, Lewis gives us the sense of a person, Hugo, flailing away when confronted with the void.  But we don’t even know what the relationship is between Hugo and Madeleine and unless Hugo has some identifiable motivation for his obnoxious behaviour, we really can be interested in him or his shock at the end.       

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Leah Doz and Simon Bracken. ©2012 André du Toit.

For Tickets, visit www.fringetoronto.com.