Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
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by Sarah Illiatovitch-Goldman, directed by Jill Harper
Cue6 Productions, Unit 102 Theatre, Toronto
May 24-June 9, 2012
“Mama, take this badge off of me, I can’t use it anymore” Bob Dylan
Pieces, a new play by Sarah Illiatovitch-Goldman, poses a fascinating central dilemma and employs an unusual structural concept, but it is sadly let down by ineffective performances from two of its three major actors. The play was one of three short-listed for the RBC Tarragon Emerging Playwrights Competition and it is easy to see why. Illiatovitch-Goldman has a gift for writing naturalistic dialogue that accurately reflects how contemporary people would speak in the situations she devises. Individual scenes centre on the characters’ core problems and how they confront or avoid them. The playwright presents the actors of Pieces with a challenge in that the order in which five of the scenes are presented is random.
The structure of the play is its most controversial aspect. As publicity for the show states, the play presents “a series of scenes that tell a chronological story no matter which order they are arranged in. Before each show, the script’s sequence is randomly drawn, allowing for 120 different stories to be told.” A reading of the Director’s Notes clarifies that not al of the scenes are presented in random sequence, but rather only five key scenes set in the present. That would make sense since 5!=120. The problem is that there is an inherent contradiction between the idea of “a chronological story no matter which order they are arranged in” and “120 different stories to be told”. What would be more accurate is to say that the random selection of five scenes allows for 120 variation in the manner but not the content of telling the same story. Since, indeed, the same story is told no matter what the order of the five scenes, it is hard to see that their randomness is in any way essential.
The grandfather of plays with scenes in no fixed order is Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (written in 1836 but not performed until 1913). Büchner died before he determined the order of the scenes. Since the play was based on a real murder case, all that’s is necessary is that Woyzeck and his wife be alive at the beginning, that she commit adultery in the middle and that he kill her near the end. All the other scenes that place their relationship in context are assorted differently by every director who takes on the play and they do affect how we regard the central action. The order used by Alban Berg in is opera Wozzeck (1925) uses an order that ends with the focus on Woyzeck’s little son, suggesting that there is further tragedy to follow.
In a less serious example, Rupert Holmes’s musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1985), based on Dickens’s unfinished murder mystery of 1870, allows the audience to vote on which of the seven possible characters committed the crime and then enacts that ending. In fiction Julio Cortázar’s famous novel Hopscotch (1963), aloes the reader to read the chapters in conventional order or in an alternative order that omits several chapters and presents an entirely different plot.
Since the randomness of the five scenes of Illiatovitch-Goldman’s play does not affect the outcome of the play, the plot or even our attitude toward the characters, it turns out not to be very important. The publicity states that because of the five scenes’ rearrangement, “Since the play changes every night, each performance is ephemeral.” Of course, as every theatre-goer knows, no two performances of the same production are ever quite the same even without the use of random ordering and live theatre by its very nature is ephemeral.
I know that Illiatovitch-Goldman and director Jill Harper have had to fight hard to defend the play’s structure, but since the randomness effects no change in the play;’s outcome I have to agree that the playwright really should choose whatever she thinks is the best order and stick with that, but add a the suggestion that future director’s should feel free to rearrange the five scenes as they see fit.
At the performance I attended (on May 25) the random scenes seem to have assorted themselves in chronological order. The basic plot presents Jim (James Downing) and Susan (Rosemary Dunsmore) as a happily married couple. Out of the blue, Jodi (Allison Price) shows up with her 4-year-old daughter Maddie when Jim is gone. The play flashes back from this situation in the present to two periods in the past – when Jim and Susan fell in love and decided to marry and when Jim, away for the week teaching at university, had a four-year affair with Jodi, who was one of his students. Jodi’s appearance in the present with her daughter poses numerous difficult problems that Illiatovitch-Goldman fully explores. The play grips us because we really want to know how the characters will cope with the serious situation Jodi represents. If Illiatovitch-Goldman wants the structure of the play to reflect its content, she really has already achieved that by means of the numerous flashbacks that are “pieces” in themselves and fragment the present action into “pieces”.
With an engaging story to tell about what responsibility people have to each other and a clever design by Jenny So that achieves maximum effect for its low budget, it is a great pity that the production should be drastically undermined by two of the three central performances. Judging from the intensity of her physical gestures and facial expressions, Allison Price would appear to be a fine actor. The main problem is that she not only does not project but actually speaks her lines at a sub-conversational level as is now common in film. One can only assume that she is used to acting with a microphone. Even worse, Price has the habit of emphasizing a serious topic by lowering her voice even further. As a result most of what she said was barely audible and often totally inaudible. It is no help that traffic noise from Dufferin Street leaks into the theatre or that the air conditioning makes a background hum or that the director has allowed the flashbacks to be underscored with music, usually songs by Bob Dylan. All the more reason then for the director to ensure that the actors can be heard.
James Downing also does not project, but at least he speaks at a conversational level. That’s not good enough for theatre, even one as small as the Unit 102 Theatre, but at least we could hear his words more often than not. The big disappointment was his near total inability to communicate any subtext. As someone who has to confront his wife and his former mistress at the same time, Downing should be conveying reams of contradictory emotions about what is happening even when he has no lines. Instead, he remains a blank slate throughout and we really have no clue about how he justifies his actions to himself.
Fortunately, the show is blessed with the presence of Rosemary Dunsmore, who gives an outstanding performance. Not only is she an expert at projecting even a whisper but she much more than Price or especially Downing is able to keep her character’s different states of mind at different time periods absolute clear. If only, Price and Downing were able to act at her level, Pieces would be a fully recommendable production.
Illiatovitch-Goldman has said that she has been told that the random scenes idea will be a barrier to future productions. Pieces, however, presents such an intriguing crisis and proposes such a remarkable solution, that I think Illiatovitch-Goldman should do whatever she can, including ditching the random scenes idea, to make sure Pieces has future productions. The way she deals with contemporary habits of compartmentalizing emotions and relationships is insightful and powerfully written and deserves as large an audience as possible. There is an audience out there who would be eager to see a play as relevant as this. I hope the playwright is willing to compromise to let them see it.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: James Downing and Rosemary Dunsmore. ©2012 Fahad Khan.
For tickets, visit http://cue6.ca.
2012-05-27
Pieces