<b>✭✭✭</b>✩✩
<b>by Steven Gallagher, directed by D. Jeremy Smith
Next Steps Productions, Next Stage Festival, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto
January 2-13, 2013
</b>
“One Marriage and a Funeral”
<i>Memorial</i> won Steven Gallagher the inaugural Trafalgar 24 Play Creation Jury Award, an award for the best play written during a 24-hour period. It is quite a remarkable achievement for a play written in such a short time, but there is no disguising the fact that it is severely flawed both in concept and tone. As a result it feel much longer than its 75 minutes.
Gallagher’s premise is hard to buy. A young gay man Dylan (Mark Crawford) has been diagnosed with brain cancer and has been given only six months to live. (We will pass over the fact that giving patients precise numbers of months to live is a commonplace of fiction, not reality.) As a control freak, he doesn’t want to leave the planning and execution of his memorial service to others but wants to do it all himself – and attend. Yes, he wants to attend his own memorial service to hear all the nice things people will say about him. Not only that, but when the play begins Dylan has forgotten that he is supposed to marry his boyfriend Trevor (Pierre Simpson) in a ceremony in his house in about two hours.
This might seem to be the plot of a comedy – and indeed there are many comic touches relating to Dylan’s obsessive compulsive behaviour – but, strangely enough, Gallagher treats this part of the play seriously by dwelling on the mental disturbances the illness forces on Dylan, the stress his illness forces on Trevor as his lover and caregiver and the sadness this forces on Dylan’s older sister Ruth (Mary Francis Moore) as a helpless observer. What makes Gallagher’s premise especially unbelievable is that the memorial service is planned to follow the wedding by only two weeks. Gather all your friends for a wedding one day and intentionally gather them all again so soon for your own memorial service – it’s rather too farfetched, as if Gallagher wants to combine the plots of two plays into one.
If Gallagher had had more than 24 hours he might have realized he doesn’t need to do this. Throughout the play objects trigger memories of the past in approximate chronological order. They move from Dylan first meeting Trevor, to introducing Trevor to Ruth for the first time, to his first proposal to Trevor, to his learning of his fatal diagnosis, to his telling Ruth about it for the first time. Except for the last two heart-wrenching scenes, Dylan’s past is played with abundant humour to contrast with his present disoriented condition. Dylan and Trevor’s wedding could easily be staged as one of these memory scenes and thus avoid the bizarre situation where, to paraphrase Hamlet, “the marriage bak'd-meats Did coldly furnish forth the memorial tables”.
Another solution would be to have Dylan plan his own memorial down to the last detail but not actually expect to attend. Not only is the attend-you-own-funeral plot inherently farcical (as in Blake Edwards’ <i>The Revenge of the Pink Panther </i>or in Robert Altman’s <i>MASH</i>) but it turns Dylan from merely an obsessive person to an outrageous egotist. Gallagher is probably trying to write a back comedy but he doesn’t create the unified wry tone needed to do this and instead allows it veer wildly from one extreme to the other.
Given the play’s unlikely premise, the cast under D. Jeremy Smith’s sympathetic direction make Gallagher’s characters as believable as possible. Mark Crawford is not afraid to make the Dylan of the present a difficult person to like. We, like Trevor and Ruth, have to keep reminding ourselves that his belligerence is a product of his disease, not his personality. The flashbacks to his past make clear that when he was well he was definitely a quirky oddball amusingly direct about his desires when he sees a handsome catch like Trevor and filled with devastating wit about his friends and ex-friends. Crawford is wonderfully funny as the happy Dylan of the past and deeply moving as the Dylan who realizes that his life will be so unfairly cut short. The problem is that Gallagher gives the dying Dylan so many mood swings that Gallagher begins to exhaust our ability to empathize with Dylan.
This is the first time I have seen Pierre Simpson act in English and take on a serious role. I was bowled over by his talent. He makes it completely believable that a steady, optimistic guy like Trevor would stand by an often out-of-control guy like Dylan since the two have opposite but complementary personalities. He makes Trevor’s quiet, unwavering affection contrast clearly with Dylan’s loud scene-making. His finest moment comes when he finally tells Dylan in detail how the stress of caring for his lover has made him seek psychological therapy, all the while knowing and lamenting that everything he says will hurt the man he loves.
Like Crawford and Simpson, Mary Francis Moore ably conveys both comedy and painful drama and is expert as communicating suppressed irritation. She is hilarious in her best scene where an argument with Dylan in the past unexpectedly leads to her waters breaking for her first child.
The ending of the play has great resonance not entirely earned by what has preceded it. If Gallagher could revise the play with that lovely ending more firmly in view, his play, which at present seems more like an uneven collection of dramatic scenes, might gain more coherence and achieve a more satisfying emotional arc.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Mark Crawford. ©2013 Jacklyn Atlas.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://fringetoronto.com/next-stage-festival">http://fringetoronto.com/next-stage-festival</a>.
<b>2013-01-05</b>
<b>Memorial</b>