Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✩✩✩
written and directed by Morris Panych
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
November 12-December 14, 2014
“Six Characters in Search of a Plot”
Morris Panych’s new comedy Sextet, now having its world premiere at the Tarragon Theatre, is frustratingly peculiar. Panych seems to be writing a modern sex farce where the only two people who have sex in it are a married couple. As the title implies this is a six-character play. Three of the characters are genuinely funny, but the other three are not. Panych’s plotting becomes so contrived and consequently so confused that we care nothing about any of the characters or what happens to them.
Panych’s premise is that a string sextet on tour has been caught in a blizzard and has taken the last available rooms in the nearest motel. Gerard (Bruce Dow) is the leader of the group and is married to Mavis (Rebecca Northan). Gerard, however, wants him and his wife to be free of the constraints of traditional marriage and encourages her to have affairs just as he does with both sexes. Mavis, therefore has slept with Otto (Jordan Pettle). She doesn’t love him but he, unfortunately, is in love with her. When he learns that Mavis is pregnant, he is certain that she is carrying his child because Gerard’s sperm count is known to be so low.
Meanwhile, Harry (Damien Atkins), the show’s narrator, a gay cellist, is forced to share a room with the group’s resident dumb hunk Dirk (Matthew Edison), thus causing Harry almost unendurable frustration. Dirk, however, realizes that he is attracted to Sylvia (Laura Condlln) because she has so far proved resistant to his charms. Sylvia’s hormones are raging, but since Harry is gay and her trusted confidant and Dirk is too much of a narcissist, Sylvia decides to throw herself at Otto. Panych thus constructs a neat circle with Harry after Dirk who is after Sylvia who is after Otto who is after Mavis who is after Gerard who is after Harry.
The situation does have great potential for comedy but Panych squanders it by giving in to his usual flaw of having all his characters speak and act in the exactly the same way, over-analyzing and over-intellectualizing their situation so that nothing happens. Thus we have a farce with six doors but no action, only six people who all speak in unnaturally long sentences declaring that that they don’t know what to do and that nothing makes sense.
In place of action, Panych substitutes the revelation of two secrets. One, is that Harry is gay. Sylvia is the only who knows, but how this could possibly be true, first, among musicians and second, among a group who has long been touring together. How can everyone know that Gerard suffers from Klinefelter syndrome and that Mavis has a a retroverted uterus and not know something far less recherché like Harry’s being gay?
The second secret has to with Mavis’s baby. Otto is convinced it is his, but Mavis insists is it not. Mavis, a strict Catholic, wants to trick Gerard into believing that the baby is his, despite his abnormally low sperm count. Whose the baby really is the is the big punchline of the play, but there were noticeably no oohs or aahs when the revelation was made because Panych had overstretched this plot point so far that we ultimately didn’t care.
Panych’s satire of human sexuality is so limp because it seems about 50 years out of date. Gerard’s explanation why he and his wife have an open marriage sounds positively antique. Sylvia as a radical feminist who hates men but needs to have regular heterosexual sex is another throwback. Worst of all for an openly gay playwright like Panych is his creation of a self-loathing homosexual like Harry. The action is set in 2014 so where does Harry’s bizarre conclusion that he will have to remain celibate all his life even come from?
Panych has written a play where six characters do nothing but complain for 90 minutes and who undergo no change of personality or world view. This gives the cast very little to work with. The two actors who do the best are Damien Atkins and Matthew Edison. Having seen Atkins play an out man with AIDS in Angels in America, it is amazing to see him turn himself into a stereotype and squeeze himself back into the closet as Harry. What makes Atkins performance successful is that he emphasizes Harry’s generally neurotic and over-analytical nature rather than the point that Harry is self-loathing gay. Atkins has perfect comic delivery and can rattle off Panych’s paragraph-long sentences in a single breath.
Edison is also very funny as Dirk. He is a hunk who knows he is a hunk and is therefore not surprised that he can have every woman he wants, except for Sylvia, in whom he has no interest until he sees that she strangely has no interest in him. Even though the mentally dim, macho narcissist is a stereotype, Edison manages to enliven it with his own quirkiness.
As Sylvia, Laura Condlln would be an excellent comic figure if her character’s problem of hating men but needing to have sex with them were not such a retrograde satire of feminism. Panych has Sylvia throw herself at Otto not for any logical reason but only so he can complete his neat little circle of relationships. Given how artificial the situation is, it’s not Condlln’s fault that she can’t make it believable. Sylvia’s relationship with Harry, in contrast, does seem real and Condlln is at her best when she is allowed to show her gentler side.
The artificiality of Gerard and Mavis’s relationship is so great it is no surprise that neither Bruce Dow nor Rebecca Northan can make it convincing or amusing. Panych does not help them by constantly revising how much each knows about the other. Jordan Pettle’s character of Otto seems like an afterthought. Panych needs six character so he creates Otto as the sixth, but forgets to give him any personality. All we know is that Otto is rich and that he believes in sex for procreation. Since even Dirk’s character is deeper, Pettle seems all at sea.
Ken MacDonald, ordinarily a perceptive set designer, has actually designed a set that causes the play to be more confusing than it already is. It looks great as long as you don’t try to fit it to the story. MacDonald has lined up six identical motel rooms in a row with door, bed, headboard, and identical over-bed paintings all in the same configuration. The only problem is that Panych’s play calls for four room, not six. Married couple Gerard and Mavis are in one, Otto and Sylvia have rooms to themselves and, as Harry complains, he and Dirk have to share a room. If, then there are four rooms, why are there six doors? Obviously, four doors would disturb the neat pattern of MacDonald’s design, but six doors means that it becomes very difficult at times to know who is in whose room and how he or she got there? This breaks one of the essential rules of farce that the audience must know at all times who is where and why.
Panych tries to give this pointless show some meaning by having the sextet that his group will play be Verklärte Nacht (Tranfigured Night) by Arnold Schoenberg. The sextet from 1899, for all its modernity, is actually programatic in that it retells in music the story of Richard Dehmel’s poem of the same name about a woman who confides in her lover that the child she is carrying is not his. In case we don’t get the relation of the work to his plot, Panych repeats the point several times. What he does not repeat is the conclusion of the poem in which the woman’s lover tells her that it doesn’t matter that that child is not his because it will still be born out of love for him.
Panych seeks profundity by concluding the play with the sextet transformed into a cohesive unit by the playing of the piece, suggesting that music is greater than petty human foibles. It’s too bad he didn’t think of having his sextet play at the beginning of the play and thus avoid the display of human foibles both in his characters and in its author for pouring out reams of words with nothing to say.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Jordan Pettle, Matthew Edison, Damien Atkins, Laura Condlln, Rebecca Northan and Bruce Dow; Laura Condlln and Bruce Dow. ©2014 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit http://tarragontheatre.com.
2014-11-20
Sextet