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by Sharr White, directed by Daniel Brooks

Canadian Stage, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

January 22-February 8, 2015

Juliana: “When I add up the balance sheet of my life the numbers say I am happy”

The Other Place, a play from 2011 by American writer Sharr White, is a highly artificial work that poses as a psychological mystery.  It is artificial because its primary method of maintaining a sense of disorientation is by withholding key information as long as possible, not unlike the lesser mysteries of Agatha Christie.  In its 85 minutes there is actually only one secret to be discovered, and once you discover it the action rapidly loses interest.

The play begins with neurologist Juliana Smithton (Tamsin Kelsey) giving a presentation at a CME (Continuing Medical Education) seminar in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands.  She is promoting a new drug based on a protein she discovered that can help fight dementia.  During her presentation she suffers what she calls “an episode”.  In fact, White has everyone call this event “an episode” for such a long time that we begin to wonder if anyone will ever explain what it was.

The play then shifts between Juliana’s presentation to points in time before and after it with White often using a change of scene to postpone the revelation of the play’s secret.  In one of the first scenes to interrupt Juliana’s drug pitch, we see her and her oncologist husband Ian (Jim Mezon) having an argument.  Juliana wonders she can’t see Ian about her medical condition and why he is sending her to see a colleague.  When Juliana mentions contacting their daughter, he flies into a fury and says that is one more thing to add to the list of things they can’t talk about.  While feuding couples often have topics that are off-limits, White uses this fact to conceal information.

One such bit of information is what kind of doctor Ian has sent his wife to see.  Most doctors in their first contact with a patient state who they are and how they hope to help the patient.  White omits this protocol and has Dr. Teller (Haley McGee) try to pry from the testy Juliana what name she would like to use.  The problem arises since Juliana claims her husband and she are in the midst of divorcing (a claim denied by Ian).  Juliana can’t see the point of the interview since she thinks she already knows the diagnosis.  She thinks she has brain cancer, just as her father and mother did at her age. 

White shows us Juliana having an awkward conversation with Laurel (McGee again), her daughter who ran away from home when she was 15.  He also shows us an awkward conversation Juliana has with Richard (Joe Cobden), Julian’s former research fellow who Juliana thinks ran away with Laurel.  White also has Juliana and Ian speak with Dr. Teller seemingly at the same time, but in reality at different time periods.  Meanwhile, White keeps returning to the presentation Juliana is giving about the new drug.  During the presentation Juliana becomes increasing obsessed with the one female in the room who is not a doctor and is dressed in a yellow string bikini.  Eventually, we come to see that Juliana’s “episode” is somehow connected to her seeing the girl in the audience. 

Near the end of the play we flash back to the night of Laurel’s disappearance when Ian, Juliana and Laurel were all staying at “the other place”, Juliana’s family’s summer cottage in Cape Cod, where she spent every weekend as a girl and which she later inherited.  In the best and most prolonged of the play’s many short scenes, Juliana later returns to “the other place” when a young woman enters who Juliana assumes is Laurel.  The woman (McGee again) treats Juliana as a disturbed but harmless intruder and denies she is Laurel until she gives in and decides to play along with Juliana since Juliana in obviously in some distress.  It’s too bad the scene would not logically occur since any normal person, phone in hand like this young woman, would immediately have called the police upon finding an intruder while fending off any interaction.

A popular dramatic form from the mid 20th century onwards has been a play where a character both narrates the action and appears in scenes within it.  Peter Shaffer’s Equus (1973) and Amadeus (1979) are prime examples as is Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (1997).  In these plays we assume that the narrator/actor is giving us an accurate account of what has happened.  The twist White brings to the form is to makes us gradually doubt the accuracy of Juliana’s narration.  Daniel MacIvor played with the notion of the unreliable narrator many years ago in plays such as Here Lies Henry (1995), where the narrator is a self-confessed liar, but for a middlebrow play like White’s the idea of coming to doubt the narrator may strike some as novel.                      

White drops numerous hints from the first of Juliana’s non-conference scenes onward about what actually is happening.  Since Juliana admits she has a medical condition that affects her mind, White would have us shift back and forth between whether Juliana’s or Ian’s view is the correct one.  In fact, attentive viewers will discover rather early what the truth is.  Once that happens the remainder of the play loses its mystery and simply becomes a confirmation of that truth. 

Canadian Stage gives a play that is only moderately interesting quite an elaborate production.  Designer Judith Bowden has created a clever set that, depending on Michael Walton’s lighting, can look like a family home, an anonymous hotel room or a doctor’s office.  The light beige of the walls allows the set also to function as a screen for Jamie Nesbitt’s projections which often are more powerful than anything the characters’ say.  The image of waves washing up on a shore links the locations of St. Thomas with Juliana’s “other place” while simultaneously suggesting the natural erosion of memory.

Jim Mezon is excellent as Ian.  By altering nothing in his behaviour he allows us to change our view of Ian as we begin to doubt Juliana.  This is because Mezon projects the complexity of Ian’s love for his wife with the anger and frustration he feels at how she has grown away from him and become, in his eyes, the victim of delusions. 

Haley McGee, whose character is labelled only as The Woman, does fine work in keeping her three main characters completely distinct, so much so that I thought she was not the same actor who played the woman at the end who encounters Juliana.  Joe Cobden’s talent, so fully on display in An Enemy of the People last year, is wasted in a few small parts in this play as The Man.   

This is the third play preoccupied with medicine this month and the third to get aspects of the subject wrong.  The most important blunder is the very presentation promoting a new drug that begins the play.  If Juliana is addressing doctors who are interested in a new drug for dementia, why does her lecture begin with a lesson in anatomy, RNA and protein folding that the doctors would have learned in first-year med school?  A real lecture promoting a drug would focus on the efficacy of the drug in various controlled trials.  But statistics and bar graphs don’t provide the chance for zippy visuals and computer animation that anatomy does.  White has clearly written Juliana’s presentation to give the theatre audience background information, not Juliana’s doctors on St. Thomas. 

I won’t reveal the “secret” that White is so careful to conceal, but I do have to say that the play’s final scene is totally implausible.  Just because Juliana is a doctor does not mean that she would ever be allowed to lecture in public on the effects of a drug she was taking while the drug trials we ongoing.  Besides that, her condition as a patient with a disease of the brain would disqualify her as a CME lecturer.

Playwright Anton Chekhov was a doctor, yet he never made a doctor a central character.  Maybe, contemporary playwrights should follow his example.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: Tamsin Kelsey; Tamsin Kelsey and Jim Mezon. ©2015 David Hou.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.