<b>✭✭✭✭</b>✩
<b>by Robert Morgan, Martha Ross and Leah Cherniak, directed by Robert Morgan
Bazotti Woodworking and pivotal(arts) theatre company, Unit 102 Theatre, Toronto
November 8-24, 2012
</b>
“You always hurt the one you love.”
Pivotal(arts) theatre company is currently mounting the 25th anniversary production of <i>The Anger in Ernest and Ernestine</i> by Robert Morgan, Martha Ross and Leah Cherniak. The comedy has been regularly produced since it first appeared in 1987, but if you have somehow managed to miss it after all these years, now is the time to see it. This production is directed by Robert Morgan, co-author and the original Ernest, designed by Glenn Davidson the original designer with the original music by George Axon. Plus Daniel Stolfi and Jennifer De Lucia are absolutely hilarious in the title roles.
<i>Ernest and Ernestine</i> is a physical not a verbal comedy. It is a series of related comic sketches about marriage featuring the same two characters. It was developed through improvisation and requires actors expert at improvisation to carry it off. Co-authors Ross and Cherniak, co-founders of Theatre Columbus, have always emphasized aspects of clown in their work, and<i> Ernest and Ernestine</i> is no exception. One reason for the success of the show is that the three co-authors have managed to uncover the clown-like in the everyday.
The show makes no pretence to naturalism. We first meet Ernest and Ernestine in front of a red curtain with microphones on either side as if it were a cabaret. There they profess their love for each other in such exaggerated tones we know that they are entering the married state with little sense of reality. Ernestine says she loves Ernest because he seems to live in his own little world. Ernest says he loves Ernestine because she is so “perky”. By the end of the play these will be the same reasons the two mention for why they hate each other.
The red curtain slides open to reveal the newlyweds’ first home – a grungy basement apartment that designer Davidson has made especially unappealing through the dominating presence of a huge furnace. Throughout the play they refer to this as their “theatre home”, thus never letting us forget that we watching a performance. At the close of each sketch, Ernest closes the red curtain. Periodically, Ernest, but more often Ernestine, comes from behind the curtain to stand in a spotlight and voice inner thoughts not necessarily related to what has just happened on stage. Though the play is nominally about marriage, many of the its funniest scenes concern the characters’ awareness that they are being observed. Often they become involved in a heated exchange only to look slowly out at us and feel embarrassed. At one point the characters, unable to turn off the furnace in the summer, become hot in all senses of the word. For the first time they look at each other with lust, not idealism, in their eyes, tear off each other’s clothes and start making out in various positions on the table. Rather too late in the proceedings, they suddenly remember that they have an audience, Ernest draws the curtain and the moaning continues.
Just as we as an audience accept a play on the belief that it will entertain or enlighten us, each member of a married couple has to accept that he or she will be able to live with the other for life. Most of the play’s humour derives from our realization, long before that of the characters, that they are incompatible. We see the obsessive compulsive Ernest carefully set out the various items of his breakfast and proceed through the meal as if it were some kind of ritual. Ernestine, on the other hand, makes a complete mess of the table as she wildly rushes through breakfast while also trying to dress for work as Ernest stares at her in disbelief. Arguments ensue in succeeding scenes concerning the furnace or Ernest’s obsession with wearing the same awful looking sweater (that he calls a jacket) day after day. At one point the two return after a traffic mishap and draft an angry letter to the people at city hall who post traffic signs. We can tell that the vehement incoherence of their anger against the city is fuelled not so much by the accident as by the gradual build-up in anger against each other. Eventually, with no their party to blame, they turn their anger on each other in scenes filled with both comedy and remorse.
Daniel Stolfi is quite simply a brilliant comic actor. He makes Ernest an absolutely clueless nerd. It is hilarious to see how Ernest’s whole body registers, but tries not to reveal, the disgust it feels at how Ernestine has breakfast. He is expert in delivering Ernest’s ludicrous excuses for being six hours late for a date with Ernestine in a completely deadpan way. In one delightful sketch, Stolfi shows how the awkward Ernest struggles with himself not to dance Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean” only to give a fantastic display of dancing.
For her part Jennifer De Lucia is especially funny in acting Ernestine’s chaotic breakfasts and in speaking Ernestine’s sometimes nonsensical monologues before the curtain. Her quivering chin as she reads out a list of words she and Ernest have decided she should never mention tells the whole story of how she struggles to smother her growing anger with Ernest’s “rules” through avowals of love.
If Ernest and Ernestine end up sadder but wiser at the end of the play, we end up sore with laughter at seeing the pressures of compromise that any relationship demands so unrestrainedly magnified and exposed. I’m sorry to have missed the original production in 1987, but this new production is so brilliantly executed that Stolfi and De Lucia have surely set a new benchmark in how these now classic comic characters are portrayed.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Jennifer De Lucia and Daniel Stolfi. ©2012 Deanna L. Palazzo.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.pivotalarts.ca">www.pivotalarts.ca</a>.
<b>2012-11-10</b>
<b>The Anger in Ernest and Ernestine</b>