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written and directed by Jordan Tannahill

Suburban Beast, Next Stage Festival, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto

January 2-12, 2013

“Nightmare on Neighbourly Lane”

Jordan Tannahill’s Post Eden that premiered at the 2010 SummerWorks Festival return to the stage in a much altered form.  The notion of revealing the suburb of Richmond Hill as a locus of outlandish occurrences is fun and the play is bursting with fascinating images though it’s clear Tannahill has watched rather too many films by David Lynch and Lars von Trier.  The trouble is that 75 minutes of bizarrerie for its own sake doesn’t lead to anything.  Tannahill’s search for the recherché lead to a host of inconsistencies that prevent the show from making sense.

The set for the play features a nearly stage-length screen on the back wall where a film plays throughout the performance.  The actors sit on chairs against the left and right walls and walk up to platforms with mikes at either side of the screen to deliver the dialogue.  The promo for the show claims that the “Actors onstage interact with their filmic selves in disarming ways, as the lines between documentary and fantasy blur”.  That sounds great but that’s not what happens.  The onstage actors never “interact” with their filmic selves, unlike Pierre-Yves Lemieux’s La Belle et la Bête, where projected images and real actors appear in a shared space.  Rather, Tannahill’s actors merely supply the voices for their mute selves on film.  Whether this dubbing represents what the oddly closed-lipped film characters are saying or thinking is not always clear.

More peculiar is Tannahill’s complete abandonment of this complex set-up about two-thirds through the show when two characters play out their scenes without mikes or film accompaniment downstage centre.  Does this mean these scenes are more real that what has gone before?  Or does it mean Tannahill hasn’t figured out to stage them within the initial format?

The play follows a day in the life of five residents of Neighbourly Lane in Richmond Hill in January 2010.  The film gives the exact time for each scene as if the film were a documentary.  It happens that Ashley (Sascha Cole) wakes up to the sound of a plane overhead only to hear the sound of moaning in the street.  She goes to investigate to find a young man Jacob (Kevin Jake Walker), bleeding profusely, who claims to have been attacked by coyotes.  Despite her fear of rabies, Ashley takes Jacob back to her house to clean him up, rather than dial 911 to have professionals do it.  Obviously, Tannahill is not seeking realism, but when Ashley’s mother Susan (Linnea Swan) has a taste of Jacob’s blood in the sink, even dream logic doesn’t make sense of the action. 

Seven months earlier Susan’s husband and Ashley’s father Robert (Sean Dixon) had left his family to move four door down to another house.  Susan was angry because he, a doctor, was having an affair with a nurse.  Robert was angry because his wife and daughter showed more affection to the ailing family dog Eden (Lindsey Clark) they ever did to him.                

Jacob’s fear is that the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider buried beneath the Franco-Swiss border could create a black hold that would swallow up the earth.  Ashley’s fear is that she and her mother made a mistake by burying Eden in the back yard instead of in the field where the dog always felt free.  She hears the dog’s restlessness in the ground and feels this error has placed a curse on her family.  

Tannahill is so busy piling weirdness on top of weirdness that he has no time to create characters we care an iota about.  This is just as well since at the end the spirit of the talking dog Eden reveals that nothing has resulted from any of the actions that we have watch happening – except that her reburial has freed her spirit to roam with the “ancestors”.  

Besides the pointlessness of it all, Tannahill includes numerous details in his text and direction that are never clarified.  Why, when Susan says she stops on the street and stares into the eyes of a coyote, does the film show her staying at Jacob?  Why does Robert allow Susan to get in his car when he won’t allow her to enter his house?  Why, when Ashley and Jacob are concerned about being noticed when they move Eden’s bones for re-burial, do he wear a stag head and she a rabbit head?  Since Ashley and Jacob are teens and discuss whether to have sex, why does Tannahill have them speak and think as if they were only six or seven?  And, of course, why does his abandon the whole film and microphone set-up for the incredibly awkward staging of Susan’s attempt to make a plaster cast of Robert’s erection, which, sadly, seems to rise only as far as horizontal.

I remained completely uninterested by Ashley and Jacob, but it is not the fault of Cole and Walker since their parts are both poorly written and directed.  Clark did generate a generous feeling of sympathy for Eden.  Swan succeeds best at making her characters seem like a real person, while Dixon at least conveyed Robert’s overwhelming sense of paranoia.  

The most successful element of the show is Sam Lebel-Wong’s film that brings out a feeling of intense alienation in its depiction of the suburban landscape.  Characters even when together appear as isolated individuals.  The anonymous New Agey soundtrack creates an atmosphere of portent and tension but is too loud to be eerie.

At the bottom of Tannahill’s play is the notion that the suburbs are just a thin, recent veneer on an ancient, wild land the wildness cannot help but affect those who live on top of it.  This is a great idea but it has lead, unfortunately, to a play that itself is more interested in the superficial than the fundamental.  Post Eden (complete with obvious symbolism) is supposedly the first of the “Edge City Trilogy”.  Let’s hope that Tannahill can manage to control his irrepressible love of the bizarre to find something to say in the next two plays. 

              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Lindsey Clark as Eden. ©2012 Suburban Beast.

For tickets, visit http://fringetoronto.com/next-stage-festival.