Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✭✭✩
by Melissa James Gibson, directed by Matthew Jocelyn
Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
March 21-April 13, 2013
Jane to Alan: “Why are you sitting in the almost dark?”
Melissa James Gibson’s This may have one of the worst titles for a play in recent memory, but don’t let that prevent you from seeing it. Gibson gives you no way to judge the play by its title and that’s just fine. Her subject is the indefinite morass of corroding feelings of regret and despair that make the onset of middle-age such a trying period for so many people. It’s one of those rare commodities nowadays - a genuinely funny, clever, intelligently written comedy that doesn’t forget that people can be funny and still feel pain.
The story focusses on a group of four people who have been friends since university. Married couple successful jazz singer Marrell (Yanna McIntosh) and not-so-successful wood-carver Tom (Jonathon Young) have just had a baby, but the child hasn’t brought them any closer. In fact, its waking every fifteen minutes has left the two sleep-deprived and has only frayed nerves further that their unhappy marriage had already made overly sensitive. Alan (Alon Nashman) is their gay friend who is the rather clichéd clown of the group. Yet, he doesn’t just cheer them up but also keeps them on track since he makes his living as a mnemonist, a person who has the ability to memorize vast quantities of data. His specialty is recounting word for word every conversation he has had or heard anyone have – including his friends’. But as he reaches middle-age, he finds he ability to entertain is not fulfilling. He would really like to do good.
At the centre of the group, and the play, is widowed mother Jane (Laura Condlln), whose husband died almost a year ago. She thinks she is over her grief, but she still has her husband’s ashes in a bag on top of the fridge and can’t bring herself to scatter them. Marrell decides that the way to shake Jane out of her stasis is to try to get her interested in Jean-Pierre (Christian Laurin), a tall, sexy French Doctor-Without-Borders she has met. The play begins with the dinner party where Marrell and Tom introduce Jane to Jean-Pierre.
In the course of the party Tom and Marrell get the group to play a game where one person goes out of the room. On re-entering that person has to try to guess what story the others have concocted asking only yes or no questions. The trick is that the others have not made up a story so that the person who re-enters really reveals more about herself through kind of story she invents to fit the answers of the others.
Jane is very reluctantly chosen as “it” and the story she comes up with is about adultery. Part of the cleverness of Gibson’s play is that Jane’s invented story soon comes true and by the end of the play she is questioned about what happened in exactly the same way as the game had been played at the start - except that this time the story is real and has already happened.
It does not give anything away to say that the adultery is between Tom and Jane. It happens in just the second scene and much of the tension in the play derives from seeing whether Jane, who has never kept any secrets from her best friend Marrell, will find the courage to tell her and from wondering what the fallout will be if she does.
The idea of game-playing has figured in all of the plays Matthew Jocelyn has directed. In Pierre Corneille’s The Liar at Stratford in 2006, the actors chose their roles just before the performance started and Marivaux’s The Game of Love and Chance he directed for Canadian Stage last year has game-playing as theatre built into its title and structure. Gibson’s play, where a game becomes reality, is thus perfect for him.
There are two aspects of his strategy in directing Gibson’s play. One is the now old-fashioned technique of breaking down the boundaries between actors and audience. There is a playing area but no dais or proscenium to separate it from the audience. Since the actors often make entrances and exits through the audience and even take (assigned) seats in the audience when not speaking and since the light are never entirely dimmed, Jocelyn suggests that the entire auditorium, including, the audience’s seating area, constitutes the “playing area”. Before the action per se begins, he has the actors come out and engage in what are supposed to look like impromptu conversations. The problem with this is that regular theatre-goers have seen this technique so many times before that they simply think, “Oh, the play hasn’t really started yet since the actors are pretending to be chatting with each other. I guess I can still keep texting”.
Jocelyn’s other strategy is much more successful. He has had designer Astrid Janson strip down the Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs venue to its original walls and floor. Windows have been uncovered and the original central door is used for entrances and exits. He and Janson have placed part of the seating in what was the house left corner of the stage so that as in an alley configuration part of the audience can always see the other part. Best of all, they have gone through Gibson’s text and reduced the props to the absolute minimum. A bench, a piano, a fridge, a sink and a few assorted chairs are on stage throughout and Jason Hand’s skillful lighting and the actors’ movements easily tell us where we are when. In terms of game-playing, it thus looks like the cast is playing with what has come to hand. The bare stage and minimalist set decoration puts the emphasis where it should be in this play – on the language.
Jocelyn has drawn wonderfully fresh, natural performances from the entire cast. Condlln wonderfully conveys the mess that Jane's life is in and how her self-awareness of that mess – “this” – only seems to stifle her more. She is as angry at what has happened to her as she is at her friends’ incessant “sorriness” for her. Jonathon Young beautifully executes Tom’s awkward seduction of Jane in which he shows all the things he knows are wrong with what he desires while simultaneously achingly expressing those same illicit desires. McIntosh, who has proven season after season her mastery of classical drama at Stratford, shows here that she can play modern comedy just as well and with just as much complexity. Nashman could tone down by several notches his character’s gay affectations, but since his character is also an entertainer, perhaps it’s suitable – and he does garner the lion’s share of laughs. Laurin easily dominates any scene he is in and he well performs the function of placing the friends’ categorization of people, their picayune preoccupations and their multiple midlife “crises” into a larger, humbling context.
This is a highly enjoyable play by a witty but thoughtful playwright. Though resident in New York, Gibson happens to have been born and raised in Canada. We have to thank Canadian Stage for bringing her work to Toronto for the first time.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jonathon Young and Laura Condlln. ©2013 Bruce Zinger.
For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.
2013-03-25
This