Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
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by Edward Allan Baker, directed by Ron Stetson
Old Norman Productions, Daniels Spectrum, Toronto
July 23-27, 2014
Old Norman Productions is currently presenting the world premiere of Sonny Under the Assumption by American playwright Edward Allan Baker in the Aki Studio Theatre of Daniels Spectrum. The play was workshopped in May last year by the graduating class of The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York City. Toronto native Nicole Cardoni, who plays the title character, and Eden Brolin started a Kickstarter campaign to bring the play to Toronto for its world premiere. Baker’s play deals with an important issue in the US – the increasing disdain of the rich for the poor and the concomitant lack of will on the part of the rich to help the poor better their lot in life. It used to be that the wealthy felt a duty to help the less fortunate, but with the gradual polarization of left and right in the US, the right has come to view helping the poor as a form of socialism.
Baker has created nine meaty roles, all of which the cast brings vividly to life. The play’s basic problems are its clunky plot and unadventurous structure.
The play is set in a Community Centre temporarily housed in the basement of the long boarded up Assumption Church in Providence, Rhode Island. Sonny (Nicole Cardoni) has become disillusioned with the heartlessness of the banking business and has become the director of the centre. Her staff is made up of her social activist boyfriend and six workers, all of whom did prison time and are now finishing their court-appointed hours of community service by preparing and delivering food to the needy. With government funding cut yet again, the centre is in desperate need of the public’s financial assistance. To publicize the Centre and the good it does, Sonny’s boyfriend Rennie (Sean Shannon) has arranged for a reporter Kat Hellman (Eden Brolin) to visit the centre and gather material for an article for a local paper. Kat, a scion of the upper crust of Providence, is put off by the whole experience and afraid of the ex-cons. Since Kat’s article is her only hope to raise awareness about the Centre, Sonny decides to educate Kat in what the real world is like and why Centres like this are necessary.
Though Baker writes in a highly realistic style, the play depicts a didactic exercise through Sonny’s instruction of Kat and has a didactic purpose in relation to the audience, though with the kind of audience that a play like this would attract, Baker is largely preaching to the converted.
In Act 1, Baker plunges us into the mayhem that makes up everyday life at the Centre, with all of Sonny’s coworkers coincidentally deciding to drop by just when she is trying to write up a grant proposal. Once Kat enters and her coldness becomes all too obvious, Sonny goes into action to force her to see the importance of what the Centre does. In Act 2, Sonny has convinced Kat that she can best understand the Centre if she interviews each of the workers and finds out why they ran afoul of the law and how the Centre has helped sort them out for re-entry into ordinary life.
In terms of style, Baker veers from the sitcom-like introduction of the characters in Act 1, to a series of serious interviews in Act 2. Were Baker more adventurous in structure, he might have punctuated the action starting in Act 1 with these interviews in the form of monologues interspersed throughout the action. Instead, he lumps them all into the second act which makes for a marked decrease in dramatic tension until Renny and then Sonny begin to question why they put up with the stress of running what seems to be a hopeless enterprise. Baker could have had a satisfying conclusion if he had ended just before the final appearance of Frankie (Bryan Hamilton). Unfortunately, Baker decides to have the play veer unnecessarily into melodrama and gives us another false ending before finally concluding the action.
Mazin Akar and Bryan Hamilton play macho guys Victor and Frankie, but Akar easily conveys that Victor is the more grounded of the two, while Hamilton successfully creates an aura of danger around Frankie. What precisely Frankie’s issues are with Sonny we never quite know. Baker thrusts us into the middle of them right at the beginning but never makes them clear. Frankie is also the only one of the ex-cons whose reason for going to jail we never learn.
Irene Rivera is totally inside her character of Lucy. Outwardly, Lucy may seem slightly ditzy, but her account of how her crime is one of the most moving. Jenny Statler’s Blake and Sage Kitchen’s Jessie may seem an odd pair but Blake’s outgoing nature clearly complements Jessie’s inwardness. Statler does what she can with Blake, but Baker makes Blake a difficult figure to understand. Blake repeatedly claims to be “crazy” but when she recounts how she deliberately embezzled funds from her father in order to ruin his reputation, the cool singlemindedness of her revenge hardly seems “crazy” at all. Kitchen shows that Jessie is still traumatized by what she did and its repercussions, yet every now and then she allows a glint of normality to shine through to make us hopeful Jessie will be able to accommodate the past.
Eden Brolin conveys Kat’s discomfort with her situation as soon as she appears and understandable prickles at Sonny’s hectoring. Nevertheless, as the interview process continues, she shows how Kat’s disdain for the lower class gradually melts as she comes to see each of them as individuals. Given the roar of the air conditioning in the Aki Studio Theatre, both Brolin and Kitchen could project more to be better heard.
Compared to Stephen Adly Guirgis’ similar play Our Lady of 121st Street (2003), about a group of erring human beings who depend on an urban community activist for stability, Baker’s Sonny Under the Assumption is much less sophisticated in plotting and in relating the background stories of its characters. Yet, with a cast as strong as the one in Toronto, Baker’s characters spring to life and become a group you will be glad to have met.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Eden Brolin and Nicole Cardoni. ©2013 Matthias Heiderich.
For tickets, visit www.sonnyundertheassumption.com.
2014-07-24
Sonny Under the Assumption