Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✭✭
by William Inge, directed by Jackie Maxwell
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 6-October 19, 2012
“A Brilliant Revival of a Masterpiece”
The Shaw Festival’s revival of William Inge’s first play, Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), is superb in every way. Jackie Maxwell’s direction masters the work’s complexities of tone perfectly, and Corinne Koslo and Ric Reid give absolutely outstanding, multilayered performances.
Set in an old house in a small midwestern city, the play looks at the lives of Lola and Doc Delaney (Koslo and Reid) and how they are affected by the presence of their boarder Marie (the unaffectedly natural Julia Course). The house is distinctly untidy and when Doc comes down to make his own breakfast and Marie’s we assume that Lola must have been ill for some time. In fact, she hasn’t been ill. Doc has merely taken up the habit of making himself breakfast before he goes to his work a a chiropractor. We discover he is a reformed alcoholic who has been sober for almost a year and is now helping to counsel drunks picked up around town and deposited in the local hospital.
All this seems good but there are minor disturbing signs. Doc’s objection to Marie’s boyfriend Turk (the suitably hunky Kevin McGarry) seem unduly harsh and we wonder what it means that he quickly takes the chance to inhale deeply the aroma of Marie’s scarf when no one is looking. As for Lola, beyond a general lassitude, nothing initially seems wrong except that she keeps dreaming of a little puppy she and Doc had called Sheba that simply “vanished into thin air” about a year ago. She makes a point of calling several times a day for little Sheba to come back.
There seems to be little tension between the couple except that Doc, as a recovered alcoholic who was guilty of some unknown but disturbing behaviour when drunk, wants to forget the past and start each day afresh while Lola is obsessed with reclaiming something lost in the past, symbolized in part by Sheba. The two also take opposite views on Marie’s behaviour. Doc despises Turk and would rather not have him enter the house, whereas Lola not only likes him but spies on Marie and Turk when they are hugging and kissing. More peculiar and annoying to Turk is when Lola decides to sit in when Marie is sketching Turk wearing only a sports outfit.
Doc has forbidden Lola to seek work so Maxwell gives us long sections of silence where we see that Lola clearly is lonely and doesn’t know what to do about it. She does not throw herself into the housework she ought to do as her energetic German neighbour Mrs. Coffman (an empathetic Sharry Flett) suggests. Instead, she embarrassingly detains every male visitor who drops by the house as long as she can – the Postman (Lorne Kennedy), the Milkman (James Pendarves) and the Messenger (Jonathan Tan) who delivers a telegram that Marie’s fiancé Bruce (Andrew Bunker) will be arriving. Maxwell makes detail after detail add up until we wonder what has caused Lola and Doc to be so sexually repressed. Does it have something to do with the death of their first child? Why do they focus their sexual interest on others instead of toward each other? The turning point comes when Doc discovers that Marie and Turk have spent the night together and unleashes a terrifying reaction from him.
It is impossible to praise Koslo and Reid enough for the heart-shattering performances they give. Koslo makes Lola a hugely sympathetic character, an ordinary person who knows something important has gone wrong in her life but can’t figure out what it is. All she knows is that she is lonely and doesn’t have the energy to do the simplest things. We might think she was depressed except that she perks up whenever a man is around and manages to do in a day what she could not in a year when she learns Bruce will be coming over. The fact that she is not wise and does not understand why the world she lives in is so bleak makes her all the more a representative of humanity in general. It’s painful to watch how Koslo reacts to every disappointment she receives as if she had grown used to it. Yet, her futile calling for her lost dog shows she has not. It’s a beautiful, emotionally rich performance in every detail.
Reid’s performance works more as a slow burn. He shows a person who tries to be a good man and husband, but what he makes evident is the trying. He gives a deliberateness to Doc’s movements and a calmness to his speech that reveals that Doc is not free but is perpetually monitoring and controlling himself. Reid impressively gradates the difficulty of this effort as more incidents accrue to impinge on his obsession with Marie. When his fury is unleashed it is horrific. The pain he conveys when he realizes what he might have done and what the cost will be is almost unbearable to watch. The intensity and depth of raw emotion he conjures up is amazing.
These performances alone make Come Back, Little Sheba the must-see play of the summer. But the production is a tour de force of design and direction besides. Poddubiuk’s set has embedded the kitchen sink naturalism of Inge’s play within a non-naturalistic environment. The two focal acting spaces are the living room on one level downstage and the kitchen on an upper level upstage. Some walls are solid and some merely suggested providing the audience, but not the characters, with a clear view through the living room into the kitchen. Behind these outlines and above the stage hang miscellaneous doors and windows. On the one hand, these suggest the neighbours all around whose presence enforces a sense of propriety that also causes repression. On the others hand, they suggest a myriad of pathways that are now closed to Doc and Lola because of the events that happened in their past.
How Maxwell uses this set s a marvel. The two playing areas where the events in one supposedly cannot be seen from the other allows Maxwell in concert with Bonnie Beecher’s subtle lighting enormous possibilities of staging events simultaneously. She creates mounting tension by contrasting the actions occurring in the two spaces. Lola happily eats her breakfast while Doc smothers his face in Marie’s scarf. Lola sits with Marie and Turk in the living room while Doc sneaks the whisky bottle from the cupboard in the kitchen. All of this conjures up an atmosphere both of secrecy and constant intrusion which underscores the dread the characters feel of what lies within them and without.
Jackie Maxwell’s championing of William Inge in her productions of Picnic (1953) in 2001 and Bus Stop (1955) in 2005 along with this brilliant production will convince anyone who has seen them that Inge ranks alongside Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller as one of the great American dramatists. To rehabilitate a neglected author is a worthy goal, but to do so with such grace and understanding turns a good deed into a magnificent experience.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Corinne Koslo. ©2012 David Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.
2012-08-11
Come Back, Little Sheba