Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✩✩✩
by Amy Lee Lavoie, directed by Ron Jenkins
Factory Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
May 9-26, 2013
“South Porcupine is Less Interesting Than You Might Think”
Stopheart by Amy Lee Lavoie, now having its world premiere at Factory Theatre, is a lot like the people living in its setting of South Porcupine, Ontario. It has lots of things it wants to do, but nowhere to go. Act 1 spends so much time introducing the characters and their quirks, it forgets to create a plot. In Act 2 a plot suddenly appears and then vanishes about a half hour later. The flaws in Stopheart are so obvious, it’s surprising anyone thought is was ready for a full production.
Given that the author herself is from South Porcupine, you might think the play would have a ring of authenticity. In fact, Lavoie’s portrayal of small town life is so generalized and clichéd that the action could be set in any small town in Canada not near a big city. The central character is Elian Fink (Amitai Marmorstein), a name chosen because it is funny. Too bad that last name has already been overused for that purpose (e.g. the movie Barton Fink). Elian is a store clerk at Freshie Mart, which, contrary to its name, seems to stock only canned goods. He peers into the night sky and in Lavoie’s variably successful flights of poetic prose, yearns for something more. Why do parents ask him to “try” harder? Why don’t they ask him to “fly”?
We don’t actually ever see Elian’s parents ask him to do anything except participate in acting out various scenes of his mother’s funeral. His mother Goldie (Elizabeth Saunders) has a hole in her heart and has the notion that to prepare her husband Cricket (Martin Julien) and Elian for her death (at some unknown time in the future), they should all practice the parts they will play at her funeral each day. The single funniest thing in the play is nothing said but the hand-decorated pastel casket Cricket has made for Goldie complete with mini marquee lighting inside. Once the casket is revealed, Goldie’s funeral rehearsals generate humour in inverse proportion to the enormous amount of time Lavoie spends on them.
Away from home, Elian’s only friend is July (Vivian Endicott-Douglas), a plump foul-mouthed co-worker at Freshie Mart. Whether she is or is not attracted to Elian is completely unclear. After meandering along through sitcom-like skits set either at Elian’s home or the store, one sign appears to indicate that something may happen in the play. This is the arrival of July’s half-brother Bear (Garret C. Smith), a half-native Canadian who shares a mother with July. He has unexpected been paroled from prison for good behaviour. What precisely he did is never clear. He says he took a hit for July, but Lavoie never tells us what happened. All she lets us know is that July is not happy to see Bear and that she thinks that Elian should never see him.
Elian is so odd, and his family even odder, that when he tells Goldie in Act 1 that he thinks he might be gay, we think nothing of it. We continue to think nothing of it when Elian sees Bear on July’s fire-escape at night and calls him “Romeo”. It seems just another weird thing of many he has said. That’s too bad since this turns out to be a major point in Act 2, when the plot finally arrives and we see that Elian has developed a crush on Bear. Lavoie has given us so little information about Bear that it’s impossible to judge whether what happens when Elian does meet Bear makes sense or not.
For a play running longer than two hours, Lavoie really doesn’t let us know any of the characters very well except for Elian. Essential questions about their backgrounds remain unanswered. How long have Goldie’s funeral rehearsals been going on? If Goldie was diagnosed with a hole in the heart or congenital ventricular septal defect, why wasn’t this repaired in childhood as normally would be the case? Where did Lavoie get the false notion that a VSD is some kind of terminal illness? As for July and Bear, we hear that they both hate their mother, but why is never explained. Not only is Bear’s crime never made clear, neither is July’s anger at Bear.
Lavoie makes the mistake of many young Canadian playwrights in pursuing quirkiness for its own sake. Here this pursuit leads to neglect of plot and of creating fully rounded characters. The most unpleasant aspect of her particular type of quirkiness is her use of repetition. Elian and July say goodbye to each other with the phrases “Love you like butter” and “Love you back like bacon” so often it becomes tedious. Lavoie gives Bear one native song that he sings about four times during the show. Does he know only one song? In one excruciating scene Lavoie has Goldie repeat the words “I love you” to Elian while showering him with toilet paper for what feels like forever. Does this self-indulgence suggest that Lavoie thinks the words mean more or mean less upon repetition? Closing the play with the same technique leads to the same bafflement and annoyance. The one time Lavoie’s penchant for repetition works is in Act 2 when a suffering Elian repeats “I’m tired” to his mother, but this work many because Marmorstein is able to make each iteration reflect a more serious degree of hopelessness.
The one factor that makes this ill-formed play work at all is the outstanding performance of Marmorstein. He is imbues Elian with an all too believable mixture of anger, frustration, longing, despair and whimsy as a young man who feels condemned to live his life in the middle of nowhere and never know who he is or what he might accomplish. In the final scene when he confesses all his problems to his mother the play makes a radical shift from boring flippancy to real emotion all due to the intensity of Marmorstein’s acting. Having previously seen him only speaking in a silly voice as precocious child in Legoland, it was a pleasure to see how wide-ranging his talent really is.
Saunders makes Goldie believable only up to a point mostly because Lavoie gives us so little information about her. Saunders is lovely as a comforting mother and suitably obsessive as a death-focussed woman. What is unclear is whether we are supposed to think her rational as the former and loony as the latter or somehow rational in both capacities. Martin Julien can do little to make his cardboard character interesting. Cricket wears cowboy outfits and has John Wayne as his hero, meaning that he is either very old, which is not how he plays it, or the product of a cliché. Endicott-Douglas would be quite funny, but she rushes through her lines with such speed and so little articulation that half of what she says goes missing. Garret C. Smith is good at showing us that Bear is a man consumed with anger, but Lavoie gives him no help in indicating why this is so or whether he has always been like this.
How we get from Elian’s last scene with his mother to the final two scenes of the play is a mystery. The scenes could tug at the emotions but since Lavoie has neglected to tell us what happened they come off as emotion for the sake of emotion to cap off a play that has failed to deal incisively with its characters, except Elian, or its story, whatever that may be. Lavoie may be choosing the wacky worlds of Morris Panych or Judith Thompson as a model, but the best scenes in Stopheart are those that focus on real people coping with real emotions. Let’s hope she focusses on this in her next play.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Amitai Marmorstein, Elizabeth Saunders and Martin Julien. ©2013 Jeremy Mimnagh.
For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.
2013-05-10
Stopheart