Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✭✩
by Betty Lambert, directed by Anna Mackay-Smith
Unit 102 Theatre Actors Company, Unit 102 Theatre, Toronto
March 19-29, 2014
“I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart” Anne Frank, July 15, 1944
Unit 102 Theatre Actors Company, known for its choice of edgy material, is presenting one of its most disturbing productions yet. Under the Skin (1985), the last play written by BC playwright Betty Lambert (1933-83) before her untimely death, is an uncompromising study of an abusive marriage so fraught with tension that eventually even a loud stage noise will make you jump. Director Anna Mackay-Smith has drawn such realistic performances from Luis Fernandes as John, the husband, Sam Coyle as his wife and Krista Morin as their neighbour that the level of verbal and physical abuse John deals out to the two women drew gasps and suppressed curses. It is remarkable that such a powerful play is so little known, but the Unit 102 production only demonstrates that the passage of 30 years has dimmed none of its strength.
The relationship between John and his wife Renee (pronounced ree-nee) is tough enough to watch, but Lambert begins the action with an equally unsettling subject. Emma, the 12-year-old daughter of John and Renee’s neighbour Maggie, has just gone missing and Maggie is hysterical with worry. John has participated in search parties for Emma and Renee offers food and comfort but is relatively calm, believing as does John that Emma has just run off with some man and that Emma is bound to get in touch as soon as this fling is over. John’s evidence for such an idea is that he has noted how Emma had been “rubbing herself against” him lately and that Emma had told him Maggie was going to get her birth control when Emma became sexually active. Maggie naturally finds such suggestions offensive and says that Emma would never do such a thing, especially since Emma had entered a “religious phase” recently. After Maggie leaves, any shred of creditability we may have had for John vanishes when he forces Renee to have sex with him then and there in the kitchen.
Over the next six months, presented in the course of 105 nerve-wracking minutes without intermission, we see the different courses that Maggie and Renee take. Maggie, who had been falling apart physically and mentally, eventually goes back to her job as a university English professor. She moves from wanting only to die to living on without knowing why to accepting that Emma must be dead and is not merely missing. Emma’s cries for help that Maggie used to hear eventually vanish and she seems to pull herself together.
Renee’s life, for unclear reasons, takes exactly the opposite course. When we first see her she is naive, obsessive about cleaning her house and perky in a way that suggests she is not too bright. Her kitchen is decorated with plaques with cosy maxims about home, family and love that one might find at a greeting card store. She misuses words and makes grammatical errors. None of this bothers us at first until we realize that Renee is extremely self-conscious about her lack of education. Being in the presence of an English professor, even someone who is mentally a wreck because of her lost child, still makes her feel nervous and inferior.
We start to pay more attention to Renee’s self-consciousness when we see that John, a self-educated furniture-maker, uses it against her. Not only does he criticize every thing she says or does in absurdly harsh terms, he tells her she is so “ignorant” and could never survive in the outside world without him. He tells her repeatedly that she is a “whore” and he married her out of pity. He claims that she didn’t tell him about her two children from her previous marriage until after they agreed to marry. Those two children, who live in their house, he says have nothing to do with him because they are not his blood. He views them as a mark of shame that Renee brought with her into their marriage. When Renee “gets out of line”, John feels it is his right as a husband to beat and humiliate her.
Maggie, once she has managed to reach some level of normality, notices that Renee is becoming increasingly anxious and defensive. When Maggie asks Renee outright why she continues to take such revolting behaviour from John, Renee claims she “likes it”. This is one of the more dismaying statements in the play. On the one hand, we would like to believe that Renee is just lying to preserve what little respect she has, since she already feels herself inferior to Maggie. On the other hand, horrible as it may seem, Renee may actually believe she “likes it”, because of John’s relentlessly cruel indoctrination of that idea. Renee may be breaking down because she has begun to see her life for what it is. Near the end, Maggie is the one comforting Renee just as Renee had comforted Maggie at the beginning.
There is, of course, something that looms increasingly larger as the action continues. What relation is there between the two halves of the story – between Maggie’s loss of Emma and John and Renee’s deteriorating marriage? As it happens the two are related and anyone who visits Betty Lambert’s website can easily find out what it is. I would advise potential audience members NOT to visit the website until after the show. Lambert has based her play on the real case of a 12-year-old girl who disappeared in 1976 in Port Moody, BC. The reason I advise against visiting Lambert’s website is because Lambert may have used numerous details from the Port Moody case, but her intent was not to re-create it on stage but to use it as a starting point for her own exploration of abusive relationships. What finally happens in Lambert’s play is deliberately ambiguous – so ambiguous, in fact, that many may not know what actually has happened or why.
Lambert has left clues throughout the play that point to various conclusions, but we are usually so absorbed in the onstage action fully to absorb their implications. Only after the play is over are we calm enough to piece together the various scenarios that these clues suggest. It is perhaps no accident that the word “scenario” comes up in a discussion between Maggie and Renee along with the notion that other people live in the scenarios we create for them. In this way, Lambert elevates what might have been a crime drama or a family drama to a more philosophical level.
Besides mention of Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, a recurrent argument between John and Maggie concerns the last line of The Diary of Anne Frank. Maggie firmly believes its is the line: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” John, however, says it is the line: “If only there were no other people in the world.” The two lines have very different implications. As it happens, John is correct, but Lambert asks us to apply both views of humanity to what we see on stage.
Unit 102’s production is the most elaborate I have ever seen at that venue. Designer Danielle Sahota has created a minutely detailed kitchen including a working refrigerator and a wireless phone with antenna that reflect the late 1970s. If anything dates the play, it is the complete lack of any mention of personal computers or cell phones. Such external details, however, do not mean the problems the characters face are any less timely.
If our stomachs tighten at Fernandes’ every entrance as John, we tend to relax whenever Krista Morin appears as Maggie. Morin sensitively delineates the wide dramatic arc Maggie makes from utter despair and confusion to strength and justified indignation. We keep praying that Maggie’s ability to turn herself around will somehow inspire Renee, but life is not as simple as that and Morin makes us feel how hope and frustration battle within Maggie every time she tries to help Renee.
Sam Coyle’s performance as Renee is equally detailed. At first we are inclined to laugh at her grammatical errors and the baby talk she uses with John calling him “Scruffy Bear” when he is angry. Soon enough, though, Coyle shows us that it becomes increasingly difficult for Renee to maintain a façade that is normal, let alone cheerful. We see that her tidying habits are an attempt to keep the outer world in order even if her inner world is in chaos. Coyle shows how John’s verbal and physical blows that used to glance off her begin to have more impact and require ever more time for her to regain a semblance of composure. Coyle makes us worry that Renee has been driven into such a state of denial that Renee, like John, is becoming unhinged.
Under the Skin is like watching a car crash in slow motion. It is painful to watch, but we can’t turn our eyes away. It is so well acted we sometimes forget that the cast are not the same as their characters when waves of anger or relief well up in us. Some aspects of the play are deliberately ambiguous. Others, like John and Renee’s vacation and its aftermath, are simply unclear. Lambert died without ever having a chance to revise the script so that her intention in certain passages will never be know.
The high level of the acting and direction make this show a shattering experience. But you will leave wondering why the play is not better known and more often studied. We owe a debt of gratitude to Unit 102 for so vividly demonstrating how explosive Lambert’s work still is.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Luis Fernandes, Sam Coyle and Krista Morin; Luis Fernandes. ©2014 Michael Osuszek
For tickets, visit www.unit102theatre.com.
2014-03-22
Under the Skin