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by Michael Ondaatje, directed by Daniel Brooks

Necessary Angel with The Film Farm, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto

February 10-26, 2012

“There is the hidden presence of others in us”

Necessary Angel has brought back Divisadero: a performance after its successful run last year.  Based on Michael Ondaatje’s 2007 novel, it is an experimental piece directed by Daniel Brooks featuring many fine performances.  Ultimately, however, it is unsatisfying for the simple reason that the show presents only the first two-thirds of the novel. 

When the novel first appeared it divided critics because of its unusual structure in which the final third seemingly has nothing to do with the first two-thirds.  Those who praised the book found the final third essential in understanding the book as a whole.  Those who disliked the book found it frustrating that the final third seemed to abandon the major characters of the first part without resolving their story.  This, presenting only the first two-thirds is a ploy that will please no one.  Either you will feel that Ondaatje’s overall scheme has not been realized or you will feel, as I did while watching its final preview, that you have been following a story that goes nowhere.

The story begins on a farm in Northern California.  The principal narrator Anna (Maggie Huculak) explains that after her mother died in childbirth her father (Tom McCamus) adopted a child of the same age, Claire (Liane Balaban), whose mother had suffered the same fate and raised the two as twins.  He also took care of the boy Coop (Justin Rutledge), whose parents had been murdered by an errant farmhand when Coop was only four.  As one might expect, after the girls reach puberty they begin an unconscious competition for Coop’s attention.  Anna is the one who “succeeds” at age 16 when Coop is 20.  During an afternoon of bliss, Anna’s father discover the couple in flagrante and beats Coop almost to death.  Soon afterwards, Anna escapes her father and lives life as a runaway.

The scene shifts to Coop, who recovered from his injuries, moves to Southern California where he becomes a gambler and card sharp.  After a trip to Las Vegas to visit a master gambler (McCamus again) he perfects the tricks of the trade and uses them in a scam to defeat a powerful player who thereafter plans revenge.  Feeling he is safe in a tiny California town, he lives a solitary life until he lets his guard down when he becomes attracted to a drug-addicted singer Bridget (Amy Rutherford).  When she goes missing and sends him a postcard from the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, he suspects that she has been used to lure him out of hiding and into danger.

The title “Divisadero” means “a dividing boundary” in Spanish.  It refers to the street in San Francisco where Claire works that once separated the town from the fort that guarded it.  It also refers to the division in the book between the Anna-Claire-Coop story and the third section in which Anna, now a writer living in France, is researching the poet Lucien Segura, whose life reflects many of the events and images of the first two sections.  The most important division, however, is the one caused when Anna’s father beats Coop and breaks apart the family he has so lovingly created.

Daniel Brooks calls his production of Divisadero “a performance” because it cannot really be classified as a play.  Behind an all-white proscenium designed by John Thompson, there are four microphones and a chair with its back to us.  The story is told to us in direct address by the various narrators in completely different acting styles.  Huculak is enormously impressive.  She speaks in a beautifully modulated voice with naturally clear diction and emphasis.  It’s the kind of soothing, sympathetic voice you could listen to for days on end.  More than any other actor she persuades you as you listen that this story is important and has meaning if you pay close enough attention.  This does not turn out to be true, but in the theatre you hang on her every word. 

McCamus is given a different set-up.  Rather than standing intensely in black behind a mic like Huculak, he is in full character and costume as Gil the card sharp to narrated the rest of Coop’s story.  This is McCamus at his best--sardonic, apparently detached and too aware of the world’s evil to fight it. 

Balaban does not operate at the same level as McCamus and Huculak.  Of the five actors she has a close-up style more associated with television than the theatre and the least clear diction.  It doesn’t help her that, as least in this adaptation, Claire is such a cipher.  Her function is primarily to emote rather than express insight and later to meet Coop again in a rather far-fetched coincidence.

Unlike the previous three, Rutherford is given no narrative but only a character to convey.  Her acting frighteningly shows us the unstable world as seen by an addict and during her amazing performance of The Clash’s song “London Calling”, in which she seems to be calling for help in the midst of her stupor, I felt as if I were suddenly watching a live David Lynch movie.

As Coop, known to be a guitar player, Rutledge does speak lines in costume and character, but he primarily expresses his character’s feelings through melancholy, insightful, folk-influenced songs of his own composition. 

The “performance” begins with a projection by Jeremy Mimnagh on the proscenium to the effect that we will discover how one of the characters became a writer.  Near the very end, we find, after much narration, that Anna is that character and she repeats the line.  This is hardly a satisfying conclusion.  If the point of the “performance” is to tell that tale, the entire central section devoted to Coop’s gambling and involvement with Bridget is irrelevant.  The point of the “performance”, instead, seems to show the inexpungible connection that all encounters with people make on our lives despite division or physical separation from them.  Anna’s final monologue (and, indeed, the missing last third of the book) show how past events prime us to see things in subsequent apparently unrelated occurrences.  Brooks use of this first projection thus sets us off on the wrong track for understanding the story and his use of a projection illustrating the five Buddhist flags that Anna gives Coop is pretty well meaningless because it is never followed up (as it is in the book).

If you love fine acting, you will be glad to see McCamus, Rutherford and above all Huculak do such exquisite work.  If you go to the theatre for an interesting story, you will likely feel frustrated since what you take as the central story is left hanging.  If you are a fan of Ondaatje, you will likely feel his adaptation has not done his own book justice.  However, you approach it, Divisadero: a performance is a theatre piece that will likely leave you with decidedly divided feelings.                

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Justin Rutledge and Amy Rutherford. ©2012 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.passemuraille.on.ca.