Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✭✩
written and directed by Rosa Labordé
Criminal Theatre with Aluna Theatre, Citizenry Café, 982 Queen St. West, Toronto
September 3-13, 2014
Ray: “I’ve never done that before ... or have I?”
Rosa Labordé’s sold-out Fringe hit True has returned for a second run. If you missed it before, don’t miss it this time. Labordé packs more ideas into her play’s 75 minutes than most playwrights do in three times that length, and yet these ideas about the nature of memory and of reality arise in the context of perfectly natural dialogue and interpersonal interactions. It is a real achievement that Labordé has created a play that seems so simple and even ordinary on the surface but with such complex implications.
The play is staged in the lovely interior of Citizenry Café at 982 Queen St. West, an unusual combination of coffee shop in front and clothing boutique in back. The show was listed as “site-specific” at the Fringe, but that phrase has a much stricter meaning for Labordé’s play that feels so much as if it were written for this particular site it is hard to imagine it staged elsewhere.
In the play this coffeeshop/boutique is run by three sisters – Marie (Sabrina Grdevich) the oldest, Cece (Ingrid Rae Doucet) the middle child and Anita (Shannon Taylor) the youngest. Marie is married to Franco (Scott McCord), a man she met when they were both in rehab for substance abuse. Into their lives wanders Roy (Layne Coleman), the women’s father whom they haven’t see for years. He has Alzheimer’s and is carrying a note from “A Friend” saying that abandoning a father is the worst sin of all.
Anita is the first he meets and her reaction is to send him away as soon as she can. But she can’t let him wander the streets in his pajamas as he is doing and she tries to find clothes for him in the boutique. Eventually, the rest meet Roy with reactions ranging from Franco’s curiosity to Marie’s outrage.
Halfway through the action a series of flashbacks, signalled by Trevor Schwellnus’s lighting cues, begin that give glimpses into why the sisters hate Roy so much and can’t cope with his sudden return into their lives. Anita, the most compassionate of the three, argues that Roy is not the same person he was. Since Alzheimer’s has erased his memory of the past, why should they keep these negative thoughts about him alive? Her argument, however, is in contradiction to her behaviour we observed earlier in play. Anita refuses to eat Italian food because of something that happened when she was travelling in Rome. It is Franco who argues that Anita is letting her memory of that one incident dominate her life in the present. To be free she should consider that the incident could just as likely not have happened at all.
Franco gives his argument as if it were something drummed into him in rehab. In fact, Franco’s argument derives from the implications of quantum physics. Quantum physic postulates that the path of an electron after a collision only becomes definite if it is measured. In 1935 Erwin Schrödinger realized the paradox this posed and came up with a famous thought experiment now called “Schrödinger’s Cat”, wherein a cat that theoretically could have been poisoned inside a sealed box is deemed to be simultaneously alive and dead until someone opens the box. The solution to this paradox is the so-called “many worlds” hypothesis in which a universe exists that proceeds from every possible result of an experiment, so that Schrödinger’s cat would be dead in one universe and alive in another.
Franco’s view is that we should choose which of various outcomes of our decisions we want to live with. Just as Anita has let an event that happened once in Rome determine her present eating habits, the three sisters have let their past experience of Roy as a drunken tyrant determine how they now regard him, even though he is now clearly a different person than he used to be.
Labordé thus presents us with a wide number of views of memory. Roy has deficits in both short term and long term memory and sometimes mistakes Marie for his deceased wife. Franco envies Roy’s memory loss, stating that he would feel freer if he could be rid of some of the memories of his past. We can see why he is such an advocate of choosing which memories to use as guides. He and Marie practice a ritual, presumably learned in rehab, of “shifting the atmosphere”. If they get into an argument, as they do at the very start of the play, they reverse to where the argument began and restart their conversation to avoid the path that led to the argument. Meanwhile, Cece presents a very different way of dealing with the past by changing it into art. She is a master of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, in which cut flowers that are physically dead live again in the apotheosis of beauty that is a flower arrangement. Labordé has Cece present this as a metaphor for how Cece has managed to transform her own past.
The question Labordé poses is “What then is ‘true’?” Is it what someone like Roy imagined happening in the past? Is it what a person like Franco chooses to have happened? Or, if the past is transformed into art, what is truer – the artwork or the transient elements that were used to make it?
As if Labordé’s play did not already have enough resonance, Labordé is aware that the presence of three daughters and an abandoned father recalls the plot of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Labordé allows Lear to remain very much in the background as a kind of sounding board for her own play, yet she hints at the link between the two by calling the uncompromising truth-teller of the three daughters Cece as in Cordelia and by calling the father Roy, recalling the Old French spelling of the word for “king”.
Scott McCord’s Franco has the luxury of viewing the family’s dispute from the outside and he becomes a humorous commentator on the actions and attitudes of the daughters, even though his unstable past and present drug-taking severely undercuts his authority. The best scene in the play is that between Coleman and McCord, where McCord shows us in detail how Franco moves from distrusting this strange old man to finally identifying with him to taking Roy’s part against the daughters and even encouraging him in what may be false recollections of the past.
It’s hard to feel much sympathy for the Marie of Sabrina Grdevich, whose piercing tone is as unrelenting as her character’s heart. Shannon Taylor, in contrast, has a well-modulated voice and well conveys Anita’s mixed feelings of compassion and anger on seeing her father again. Ingrid Rae Doucet is so docile as the older Cece, it is hard to see that she was once outspoken, but then how she has changed is part of the point.
The final flashback contains so many features new to the story that it is too confusing. That ending aside, Labordé’s play is unusual in being both emotionally and intellectually engaging at once. The success that will likely meet True will mean it will have to be staged in other venues. Therefore, before that happens, see the play while you can in the space where it was meant to be seen.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Ingrid Doucet, Shannon Taylor, Layne Coleman, Sabrina Grdevich and Scott McCord; Layne Coleman and Ingrid Doucet. ©2014 Criminal Theatre.
For tickets, visit http://criminaltheatre.com.
2014-09-04
True