<b>✭✭✭</b>✩✩
<b>by Kristen Thomson, directed by Chris Abraham
Crow’s Theatre with Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
January 9-February 2, 2013
</b>
“A Play Where Everyone is Someone Else”
Kristen Thomson’s latest play, <i>Someone Else</i>, is a puzzling play about a marriage in crisis. It is more loosely structured than Thomson’s previous two plays, her much-loved <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/00138422-67FE-40B9-AAEA-61146C65A29A">I, Claudia</a></i> (2001) and <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/2293CA8F-2886-41B7-A5F1-9B377DB1297B">The Patient Hour</a></i> (2009), and mixes a number of dramatic styles – traditional dialogue, direct address to the audience and stand-up comedy. The problem is that the excitement of never knowing where the action might head next is tempered with worry that the play might not be heading anywhere.
The play centres on the marriage of Cathy (Thomson) and Peter (Tom Rooney). Cathy used to be a stand-up comic until she was heckled off the stage and found she couldn’t go back. Peter, her husband of eighteen years, is a doctor at a community clinic. In their scenes with an unseen marriage counsellor we learn that Cathy has been deeply depressed for almost a year. She blames her depression on knowing that Peter is having an affair with April (Bahia Watson), one of his patients at the clinic. Peter, however, denies he is having an affair and says that his coldness towards Cathy comes from the constant atmosphere of suspicion and jealously with which she regards him.
Anyone who knows of couples where one partner is depressed and one is not will realize how impossible it is to convince the depressed partner that he or she is depressed and needs medical help. Saying the depressed partner should see a psychiatrist is viewed as a further insult. The usual result is that the non-depressed partner, under stress from the situation, seeks psychological help in order to live in a difficult situation.
Peter finds a more disturbing solution. He is attracted to April but not, as far as is shown, for sexual reasons. April is an inner city teen whose brief life of happiness was cut short when her father died and her mother’s boyfriend, a drug lord, moved in and began to tyrannize April and her younger brother. April comes to Peter’s clinic because of her self-harming. Peter does give April extra attention both because he is trying to encourage her to pursue education to escape her family and poverty and because he identifies with the sense of self-loathing that causes her to self-harm.
The cause for Peter’s self-loathing is not revealed until late in the play. When Peter and Cathy’s rebellious daughter Vanessa (Nina Taylor) goes missing, the fear of losing her seems to unite the couple at least for a time. The play ends in the equivalent of an epilogue where one of the characters reveals several years later that everything turns out well for everybody. This upbeat ending is a total surprise and contrasts completely with the depiction of lives filled with anger and pain that has gone before. We’re glad to know that everything works out but it’s impossible to see from where we have left the characters how this could come about.
Director Chris Abraham has directed the play very much in the non-naturalistic style common in Europe, especially in Germany. Indeed, Julie Fox’s box-like set with four equally spaced doors at the back reminded me immediately of Olaf Altmann’s box-like set for Michael Thalheimer’s production <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/BEB8CC93-0A37-4FF0-880D-E2CBB6108781">Emilia Galotti</a></i> seen at the Stratford Festival in 2008. In both cases the point is to say “This is not a re-creation of reality: this is a set”. Abraham tries out various experimental techniques but they don’t always work. The play begins with Cathy sorting through filing cards with material for a stand-up routine. These she speaks through a microphone. Given what we discover later, is this the depressed Cathy of the present or the non-depressed Cathy of the future? It’s not clear. When Cathy and Peter have their first counselling session, words are projected on the back wall that the characters repeat and Cathy uses the microphone to make asides about what he or she is saying. This doesn’t happen in the second counselling session. Why? Abraham also experiments with introducing a character or reaction before its reason is known. Damien Atkins enters as David, a 40-year-old man in a wheelchair, long before we have a clue who he is or what is role is in the play. Peter undertakes an exhausting race through the four doors at the back before we discover what it is related to.
Where both Thomson as playwright and Abraham succeed is in capturing the complexity of human emotions. Thomson’s Cathy may be a comic and her remarks are often funny, but she shows that Cathy in her depression has turned her cynicism on herself and on all those around her. Anger at herself and others, boredom, love, sadness roil in her mind in a volatile mixture. Rooney gives one of his best ever performances as Peter whose mysterious self-loathing makes him almost the worst possible partner for Cathy. He seems to know it which only increases his inner turmoil. The coldness he shows Cathy is both his way both of controlling himself in relation to her volatility and in repressing his self-hatred. His scenes with April reveal a man to is trying to help someone else succeed where he has failed, but whose weakness comes through in his attraction to April’s self-harming.
A peculiarity of the play is the presence of two characters who are given only one scene each. Grade Ten student Nina Taylor is excellent at playing a daughter whose loss of sympathy for her mother is sliding into contempt. Damien Atkins gives a powerful performance as a man who suffered a head injury that left half his body paralyzed. He struggles to speak but he also struggle to retain self-composure although he is filled with rage.
The programme suggests that the play’s title refers to the “someone else” who makes Cathy and Peter realize how fragile their marriage is. In fact, since not one of the characters is what they were or would like to be, everybody is someone else. Because of this, unlike Thomson’s other plays, we understand the sources of the characters’ pain but we don’t know the characters very deeply. April and David make the greatest impression as fully rounded characters, but Vanessa appears so little wee see only one side of her. We never see Cathy and Peter when they are not mentally disturbed so it is hard to extrapolate what they once were and what they could become. The unaccountably happy ending of the epilogue only intensifies the mystery.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Kristen Thomson and Tom Rooney. ©2013 Guntar Kravis.
For tickets, visit <a href="https://www.canadianstage.com">www.canadianstage.com</a>.
<b>2013-01-11</b>
<b>Someone Else</b>