Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✩✩
by N. Richard Nash, directed by Angela Besharah
(un)happy radish co-op, Sterling Studio Theatre, Toronto
November 21-December 1, 2012
Sam: “Why should it scare me that there’s no end to beauty?”
Tilda: “Because then there’s no end to all the rest.”
If N. Richard Nash (1913-2000) is remembered at all it is as the author of the play The Rainmaker (1954). The play was later made into a Hollywood movie of the same name in 1956 starring Burt Lancaster and Katherine Hepburn and then into a the musical 110 in the Shade in 1963 by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones, the team who wrote The Fantasticks (1960). Nash’s career as a playwright was brought to a halt with the failure of his 1972 play Echoes on Broadway, currently receiving its Toronto premiere courtesy of the (un)happy radish co-op in the 50-seat Sterling Studio Theatre. I am always eager to see plays that have been neglected in their own time to discover if distance in time brings insights that critics of the period might have missed. Echoes, however, may be flawed, but not irredeemably so, and it is brought to vivid life by an impassioned company of actors.
The play concerns Tilda and Sam, two inmates of The Place who have fallen in love. The Place is assumed to be an insane asylum although Nash is at pains to make it as abstract as possible. In his notes he describes it thus: “The Place is bare except for a seeming haphazard arrangement of wooden boxes. Nearly all of them are hexahedron in shape – cubes, for the most part, with a few that are rectangular. One or two are squat cylinders.” If this is an asylum, why does he give this peculiar description? Director Angela Besharah has opted for a bare stage with two chairs and two floor-to ceiling swaths of sheer fabric. We gather that this is an institution not from the set but from the hospital pyjamas that the characters wear.
Throughout the play’s two hours, we see how the Tilda and Sam have constructed an imaginary world to inhabit to shield them from the oppressive knowledge of where they are. In effect, they have built an asylum within an asylum to help them cope with their exclusion from the outside world and from the lack of privacy inside the facility monitored by someone known only as The Person. The games they play, such as decorating an imaginary Christmas tree or playing imaginary baseball, are interrupted by outbreaks of their symptoms. As far as one can judge from her behaviour, Tilda suffers from multiple personality disorder, where she unconsciously adopts various personae that appear unknown to each other. Sam, suffers from paranoia and fears that he may have committed murder. Indeed, when he loses control he acts out a murder and at one point seems on the verge of murdering Tilda.
In some ways Echoes is a play ahead of its time in dealing exclusively with characters who live in an alternative reality. This kind of situation would become the hallmark of contemporary Irish playwright Enda Walsh in plays like Disco Pigs (1996) or The Walworth Farce (2006), where characters live in isolation from the rest of the world and have invented their own language, as in the first, or their own daily rituals, as in the second. The main difference is that Walsh’s characters disturbingly seem to live in the outside world. The first problem with Nash’s play is the unbelievability of the physical situation. If The Place actually is an insane asylum, two patients with mental disorders would hardly be likely to share the same room with a closed door – much less if they are of different sexes and especially if one has a history of violence.
The second problem is that Nash makes his two characters far too articulate. People who have a mental condition so severe that they must be institutionalized are unable to dissociate themselves from their condition far enough to discuss it objectively. Even on a less severe level, anyone who has attempted to get a friend to seek help for depression will know it is almost impossible since loss of objectivity is part of the condition. Yet Nash has Tilda and Sam discuss their mental disorders quite rationally with each other, often treating each other as stand-in therapists. In fact, Nash rather neatly always has one character remain lucid when the other is suffering a relapse.
How Echoes works best is as a showcase for the talents of the cast. Here director Angela Besharah has drawn searingly intense, committed performances from both Carleigh Beverly as Tilda and Noah Davis as Sam. Both maintain a discomfiting hunted look even in their happiest moments. Beverly clearly distinguishes through voice and gesture the various personae who take over her mind as well as presenting a hauntingly vulnerable portrait of her “true” self, who appears as a timid young girl prey to delusions beyond her control. Davis can seem calm and easy-going at one moment, but then suddenly breaks into a frightening rage the next while simultaneously showing us the pain he suffers from knowing he can’t control his emotions.
The non-speaking character known only as The Person is embodied with great physical presence by Nathan Mitchell. Besharah has him enter Tilda and Sam’s room as if he were an ape who magically shakes off his simian nature to become a man. If The Place is an asylum, he seems to represent the ever-vigilant staff and later a doctor with a surgeon’s mask. I assume Besharah has him appear as a kind of bogeyman because that’s how Tilda and Sam view him. A change in lighting and sound reinforce this sense of his unreality to the extent that we begin to think he is a product of the couple’s folie à deux.
Beverly and Davis’s performances are so painfully real and Mitchell’s so vividly disturbing that they make you forget the problematic nature of the text so that we focus, as Nash would wish, on the psychic struggles within and among the characters. Situated between Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and Peter Shaffer’s Equus (1973), Echoes suggests that those with mental illness live in a different world but one not necessarily inferior to the “real” one. The 1960s and ‘70s were preoccupied with the harm caused by institutions. Yet, since Nash has made the description of The Place so vague, we have to wonder whether the long misunderstanding of the play derives from thinking of Tilda and Sam of institutionalized. They could be just two of the many who have to make do in the outside world. If that were that case, Echoes would be decades ahead of its time. Thus, the solution to making the play work may be do away with the hospital gowns entirely and de-emphasize the institutional setting. The arrival of The Person would then be even more frightening and mysterious than it already is.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Noah Davis and Carleigh Beverly. ©2012 Inside Light Studio.
For tickets, visit www.sterlingstudiotheatre.com.
2012-11-23
Echoes