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written and directed by Michele Smith & Dean Gilmour

Theatre Smith-Gilmour, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto, March 13-31, 2013;

Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto, November 6-23, 2014;

NAC, Ottawa, March 25-April 11, 2015

Note: The title of the play was As I Lay Dying when it premiered in 2013.  For the remount in 2014 the title was changed to Take Me Back to Jefferson.

Addie: “The reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”

Although Michele Smith and Dean Gilmour have been considering an adaptation of William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying for the past ten years, it is not a work one might immediately think suited to company so focussed on physical theatre.  The novel in stream-of-consciousness style is told in 59 chapters divided among 15 different narrators.  Shifting as it does from mind to mind, from one view of the story to another, it’s a novel that one might imagine better as a radio drama than a stage play.

Yet, Smith and Gilmour with their fine ensemble of young actors has created a gripping adaptation of the novel, filled with the multiple ironies and existential questions that Faulkner poses.  The stage adaptation can’t fully capture Faulkner’s kaleidoscopic perspective or the sense of how isolated the characters are from each other.  Instead, it portrays the grand flow of this darkly comic epic and interrupts it periodically to spotlight the individual thoughts of characters even in the midst of communal action.  Thus we at least have the sense of clashing perspectives on the action even if the action cannot be portrayed from each perspective in succession as in the novel.

The adaptation follows the story, with some necessary condensation, of how the impoverished Bundren family of Mississippi deals with the death of its matriarch Addie (Michele Smith).  Even as Addie is dying, cared for by her daughter Dewey Dell (Nina Gilmour) – rather than the Tull women in the novel – her eldest son Cash (Dan Watson), a carpenter, builds her coffin right outside her bedroom window.  Anse Bundren (Dean Gilmour), the father of the family, has made a vow to fulfill Addie’s dying wish to be buried in Jefferson, where her relatives are buried, even though this will mean an arduous journey.  In one of many ways that Faulkner undercuts Anse’s pretence to piety, Anse also wants to go to Jefferson to buy a set of false teeth.  Anse has never helped out on the farm because a doctor once told him that if he were to break into a sweat it would be fatal.  Therefore, all the physical labour of the journey falls upon his children. 

To make matters worse, a recent flood has washed out all the bridges nearby to cross the river which only extends the journey and the family’s travails.  The longer-than-expected trip also means that Addie’s corpse begins to decompose and attract buzzards so that by the time the Bundrens reach Mottson on the way, the townsfolk won’t let them stay because of the stench.  As the reality of travelling in this caravan of death becomes more hideous, the sensitive son Darl (Julian De Zotti), the novel’s principal narrator, begins to lose his grip on his sanity.  By the time the family arrives in Jefferson, all the children have been damaged some way while Anse, who has complained throughout that the children have flouted his will, God’s and Addie’s, emerges strangely reinvigorated. 

Smith and Gilmour have presented Faulkner’s tale as profound critique of conservative American values like the sanctity of the family, patriarchy and filial piety and of the importance of work, honesty and “Christian” charity.  It is symbolic that the carpenter Cash should break his leg the first time by falling off a church and the second time by trying to save his mother’s coffin while fording a river.  With traditional values called into question made worse by the grotesquerie of parading a beloved mother’s decay throughout the county, it is no wonder that a character like Darl should begin to question what life actually is.  Smith and Gilmour include Darl’s important meditation on sleep that raises the Bundrens’ quest to an existential plane: “In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not.” 

The play is more full of language than some of Theatre Smith-Gilmour’s other productions but that is simply because the company wants to retain the flavour of Faulkner’s highly poetic prose.  Still, the company’s signature physical style comes to the fore in numerous scenes, most notably in the fantastic depiction through mime and sound of the Bundrens’ fording a raging river while Darl, Cash and Jewel (Benjamin Muir) struggle to save their mother’s coffin from destruction.  Another brilliantly imagined scene occurs when the Bundren sons try to save livestock along with the coffin from a burning barn.  On the comic side, the snide mutterings of the cast playing townsfolk at Addie’s wake are hilarious in their accurate observation of incompassionate humanity.                           

The actors are all well cast and wonderfully adept in the skills of mime and clown necessary for a Smith-Gilmour production.  Gilmour makes Anse such a highly ambiguous character that his piety in fulfilling his vow to Addie has an air of hypocrisy about it right from the beginning, especially since he continually uses it as a way to deny his children’s wishes.  Smith has little to say or do as Addie, but

what she does say is riveting.  In the midst of her sons’ attempts to rescue her coffin from the river, the action suddenly pauses for Addie’s speeches where she reveals a contempt for marriage and for her father’s view that “the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”  Far from the loving mother Bundren children think her, she notes chillingly that Jewel (not fathered by Anse) is the only one of her children she loves.

De Zotti gives a great performance as Darl, his odd stare and elevated speech already indicating a difference of mentality from the others that will be too fragile to withstand the journey.  His eventual breakdown into madness is supremely disturbing and he speaks Faulkner’s prose beautifully.  Nina Gilmour is a powerful presence as Dewey Dell.  She shows the girl’s anxiety over her pregnancy by a young farmhand growing throughout the play until events lead her to despair.  As Cash, Dan Watson is perhaps mentally the sanest if the most physically broken of the Bundren children.  Yet, Watson shows that even the straight-arrow Cash’s staunch beliefs are gradually undermined by what he sees happening to his father and to Darl.

As Jewel, Benjamin Muir’s performance is almost entire physical.  His mime of trying to control his wild horse, throwing him all about the stage, is so real you almost believe you see the horse in front of you.  He also plays the non-Bundren character, Dr. Peabody, whose comic obesity Muir ably conveys along with the doctor’s sharp insight into how Anse’s miserliness is causing the family serious harm.  Daniel Roberts plays the youngest Burden son Vardaman.  If you did not know the novel you would think from Roberts’ performance that Vardaman was the kind of mentally challenged adult found in so much Southern Gothic literature rather than a boy of about seven.  Nevertheless, Roberts brings such innocence to the role that Vardaman’s speculation about whether the dead Addie is still Addie or not has real poignancy.

Designer Teresa Przybylski has made a the interesting decision to have all the actors barefoot except for Smith and Gilmour.  In this subtle way she seems to undercut Anse’s frequent declarations that he has given everything he has to his children which fits in with Addie’s own unmotherly sentiments.  With a reference to clown, the cast wear false noses whenever they play a non-Bundren character – a clever reversal since the non-Bundrens have a more accurate view of the Bundren family than the Bundrens do.

In a play set on a bare stage André Du Toit’s lighting is absolutely essential for indicating time and place as well as isolating through spotlights those moments of individual perspective that punctuate the action.  My one wish would be that Smith and Gilmour could find other ways than blackouts to end the often very brief scenes since such frequent blackouts become visually tiring.

Theatre Smith-Gilmour has created another triumph in As I Lay Dying by staging what many would consider an unstageable novel, successfully bringing out all its complex themes and cruel ironies.  The production shows that the company’s technique is flexible enough to include much more speech than usual and to great effect.  Fans of the company and of Faulkner and those eager to marvel at the talent of a new crop of young actors should make As I Lay Dying a theatre-going priority.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (From top) Dean Gilmour, Nina Gilmour, Dan Watson and Julian De Zotti; cast of Take Me Back to Jefferson as townsfolk; Nina Gilmour, Dan Watson, Dean Gilmour, Julian De Zotti and Daniel Roberts. ©2013 Katherine Fleitas.

For tickets, visit www.theatresmithgilmour.com.