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by Stephen Adly Guirgis, directed by Jason Blicker

Column 13 Actors Company, Unit 102 Theatre, Toronto

May 15-25, 2013

Terry: “Love has no expiration date.”

Column 13 Actors Company is currently presenting the Canadian premiere of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s play The Little Flower of East Orange.  Column 13 is more familiar with Guirgis’s style than most, having previously mounted the playwright’s In Arabia We’d All Be Kings (1999) in 2008 and Our Lady of 121st Street (2002) in 2007.  Playgoers who have enjoyed the theatrical daring of those plays or of Guirgis’s epic The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (2005), will find Little Flower surprisingly conventional.  Nevertheless, anyone who has been intrigued by Guirgis will not want to miss the chance to see this play, especially when it is performed with such force and dedication.

Little Flower is Guirgis’s most autobiographical work.  It is about a writer haunted by the life of his Irish Catholic mother.  It is no accident that the mother is the play, Therese Marie has the same name as Guirgis’s own mother.  Besides that, Guirgis mother, who had been in full heath when he began writing the play, died suddenly during the course of Guirgis’s writing and led Guirgis to a writer’s block that he overcame only with difficulty.  Being focussed so closely on a relationship between two characters automatically makes the play different from Guirgis’s others which usually have an entire community of characters as their subject.  In Little Flower one sense Guirgis’s trying to force himself to concentrate on the mother and son while fending off his natural inclination to involve a larger number of characters in his story. 

The conceit of Little Flower is that Danny (Brandon Thomas), led before us in handcuffs, has been told to write a play about his life as part of his rehabilitation for a crime he has committed.  In the play he serves as both narrator and actor, a structure that immediately recalls The Glass Menagerie (1944) by Tennessee Williams.  In fact, Little Flower is in many ways a Glass Menagerie for the 21st century with significant alterations.  Like Williams’s play, Little Flower is about a son who has left his mother and sister to fend for themselves.  The difference is that Danny has left not to seek adventure in the merchant marine but to enter rehab for drug and alcohol abuse.  Unlike Laura of Williams’s play, Danny’s sister Justina (Angela Hanes) is the most rational and capable member of the family.  Guirgis seems to have divided Laura’s fragility between mother and son.  Danny is clearly the most emotionally fragile, while his mother Terry (Meghan McNicol) is the most physically fragile. 

Three days after Danny has left home to enter rehab, Terry has left her house and thrown herself out of her wheelchair hoping to die.  (As a devout Catholic she would never commit suicide since suicide is a sin.)  She wakes up in hospital nearly having died of exposure and unable to remember her name.  Act 1 focusses on the mystery of who the new Jane Doe patient is.  Act 2 focusses on the larger mysteries of why the patient, whom we already knew was Danny and Justina’s mother, would try to commit suicide and why her children hate each other and both love and hate their mother.

While the play is mostly naturalistic even sometimes banal in the manner of television hospital movies, it is not exclusively so.  The ghost of Terry’s father Francis James (Jonah Allison) frequently appears before her and, since he is deaf, signs to her.  When Terry suffers delusions Jimmy Stewart (Brendon G.E. Smith), Bobby Kennedy (Stephen MacDonald) and Pope John XXIII (Chemika Bennett-Heath) also put in appearances.  Otherwise, children who have had to deal with the difficulties of talking to an elderly parent who can’t or won’t listen when hard decisions have to be made will feel all to keenly how Guirgis has reflected their situation.   

Brandon Thomas gives an emotionally searing portrait of Danny, a young man who seems conflicted in everything he says or does.  Even at his most lucid as in his role as Narrator or in Danny’s final conversations with Terry, Thomas conveys realms of barely suppressed rage, guilt and sadness.  

As Terry, Meghan McNicol, who is clearly several decades too young for the part, does a fantastic job of playing mentally confused woman in her 70s.  She throws out all the clichés that most young actors fall back on in portraying older people and instead gives us such a closely observed portrayal that we soon stop thinking of the actor’s age difference entirely.  McNicol is excellent in letting us know the subtle distinction in Terry’s behaviour when she truly does understand something and when she only feigns not understanding. 

Angela Hanes gives a very realistic portrayal of Justina’s anger and frustration.  Justina has become the default caretaker of the family and receives no credit, much less praise from anyone.  Hanes shows how galling it is to be the only one who is practical yet also the one who comes in second in her mother’s affection.

Among the caretakers and investigators who surround Terry, Zach Smadu makes a strong impression as Espinosa, a male nurse from the Dominican Republic, who uses humour to deal with the unpleasantness of his work.  Chemika Bennett-Heath shows us just the opposite response in Magnolia, a religious nurse from Jamaica, who radiates warmth and good will.  Kaumil Manzoor is rather a cold fish as Dr. Shankar, but then he is not meant to be much more.  Brendon G.E. Smith shows a gentleness under the rough exterior of Detective Baker but also does an excellent Jimmy Stewart imitation.   

 

Jonah Allison conveys the strength and fury of Terry’s father Francis James along with his frustration with his deafness.  Besides these there are two more characters that Guirgis introduces only to cast them away again too soon.  One is Nadine, Danny’s drug addict girlfriend, who is the only person besides Terry who can see the ghost of Francis James.  Vanessa Trenton gives her a lovable wackiness that I hoped we would see more of.  The second character is David Halzig, a young man waiting in vain for some response from his intubated mother.  Stephen MacDonald suggests someone who has collapsed in upon himself because of hopelessness and who doesn’t deserve Espinosa’s constant taunting.  I was hoping Guirgis would further develop the parallel between David and Danny, but he does not.  

 

Jason Blicker directs the play efficiently and elicits strongly emotional performances from the principals actors.  He can’t, however, disguise the fact that the play leaves a number of important plot points unexamined.  While Terry may not consider her throwing herself out her wheelchairs as a “suicide attempt” that is how it presents itself.  She says she had hoped the doctors would not revive her because then she would not be a burden on her family.  But, knowing, as we do later, what she went through in her childhood, we really would like to know why she wants to die. 

Guirgis lets us know that she is named for Saint Thérèse of Lisieux 1873-97), known as “The Little Flower”, who found faith in realizing her own insignificance.  Terry is thus the “Little Flower” of East Orange, New Jersey.  Is it Terry’s sincere belief in her own insignificance that so angers Danny and Justine?  Did Terry come to devalue her own life for purely spiritual reasons or because of the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her father?  We need to understand this more clearly because we also need to know what exactly it was about Terry that led Danny, once a promising writer, to drink and drugs.          

Another question has to do with the nature of the play we are seeing.  Danny introduces it after being led on in handcuffs.  Are we supposed to think Danny’s play is being staged in a prison and are the actors on stage supposed to be fellow prisoners?  If so, Blicker would have to add that layer to the play because Guirgis leaves it completely unclear.                               

In his final speech Danny tells us that his mother taught him that grace is all around us.  Though the topic of grace had come up once before, this conclusion hits us as a non sequitur.  By closing with this notion, Guirgis may want us to rethink what we have just seen.  Yet, even after rethinking the action it is still difficult to see how Danny, or we, could arrive at that conclusion, knowing all that he knows.  While Little Flower may be flawed and is not as audacious as Guirgis other plays, it still brings out questions of the use and abuse of faith that help illuminate his other writings.  Given the deep faith Column 13 have investing in Little Flower, it will behoove anyone who wants to know Guirgis better to see it.

The Little Flower of East Orange is performed in repertory with Dreamer Examines His Pillow by John Patrick Shanley.  For schedule see http://column13.org.

              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Brandon Thomas.  ©2013 Column 13 Actors Company.

For tickets, visit http://column13.org.