✭✭✭✩✩

by Alison Lawrence, directed by David Ferry

the mcguffin company, Next Stage Theatre Festival, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

January 8-18, 2015

“There is nothing so damaging that it can’t heal”

Alison Lawrence’s new play Piece by Piece is thoughtful meditation on the difficult process of moving past grief to enjoy living life again.  Its earnestness and close observation of its characters command respect, but it is in need of editing and restructuring.  The same points are repeated and we often hear needlessly about events that we have just witnessed. 

Lawrence has written the work in the recent “What’s the connection?” style of playwriting where we encounter several characters whose lives at first seem so disparate that we struggle to discover what relation they have to each other.  The play opens with Virgilia Griffith as the 16-year-old Steffie directly addressing the audience.  Steffie’s comic observations on the people she sees in the ICU of a large hospital punctuate the play but they are also a source of its peculiar structure. 

Usually, a character who both narrates the action and appears in it speaks to us from two different perspectives.  The narrator side speaks to us after the events of the play have occurred.  The participant side speaks while in the midst of the events of the past.  That is not what happens here.  Steffie’s direct addresses are enmeshed in the same time period as those of the other characters.  While Griffith is wonderful as Steffie and Steffie’s speeches are a welcome relief from the serious subject matter, we wonder why she is privileged with direct address to the audience and the other grieving characters with whom she is paralleled are not.

In any case, we are so caught up in Steffie’s grim satire of families of ICU patients, the group of “troglodytes” who assemble every day waiting for their 103-year-old relative to die, that we forget to ask what a teenager is still doing in the ICU when her mother who had been kept there has already passed away.  For far too much of the play we assume that Steffie hangs out at the ICU because she can’t stand being home with her maudlin alcoholic father Bert (Brian Young), who seems addicted to watching the Shopping Channel.  What we don’t realize soon enough, even from Steffie’s direct addresses, is that she is going to the ICU instead of school and thus has as much a problem with moving beyond grief as does her father.   

We next meet the married couple Jessie (Mary Francis Moore) and John (John Cleland).  John, as we later discover, is a gerontologist at the same hospital where Steffie hangs out.  He is at the end of his tether in dealing with the deep depression Jessie has fallen into.  For unknown reasons, Lawrence withholds the reason for this depression until late in the play.  In order not to give everything away, I will merely say that Jessie has suffered a miscarriage and has become obsessed with news reports about dead children. 

The third pair of characters are the married couple Barb (Linda Goranson) and Frank (Terrence Bryant).  The two have been married 47 years.  Frank was once a renowned professor but has now been stricken with Alzheimer’s disease and no longer knows who Barb is.  Through this couple Lawrence explores the terrible situation of one partner mourning the loss of the other while he is still alive. 

Though Lawrence introduces the six characters in seemingly haphazard fashion in very short scenes, once the action continues it becomes clear that the three pairs of characters form a tight paradigm of possibilities of loss.  Jessie and John mourn the loss of a child and John mourns the loss of Jessie to grief.  Steffie and Bert mourn the loss of a mother and wife and Steffie mourns the loss of her Bert to grief.  Barb mourns the loss of Frank as a husband and father.  Jessie and John’s child never came to term.  Frank is “dead” while still alive. 

While Lawrence is excellent at depicting the characters’ grief, she makes their sudden change to recovery mode far less clear.  A play with such a powerful subject need not be a message play, but Lawrence can’t refrain from underlining her message: “There is nothing so damaging that it can’t heal”.  This motto may sound positive but it isn’t quite accurate.  Some things leave a person permanently damaged or dead.  And to continue the metaphor even if a person heals, there will be a scar and thus a permanent reminder.  The question, if a person survives, is how to deal with the scars.

Director David Ferry has assembled a strong cast who all do well.  Newcomer Virgilia Griffith is a standout as Steffie.  She brings just the right note of attitude and humour to her monologues.  If Lawrence had given them more of an undercurrent of despair, no doubt Griffith could have played that, too.  Of the three pairs the relationship between Mary Francis Moore as Jessie and John Cleland as John comes across as the strongest and most closely observed.  While Lawrence has insight to Jessie’s depression, we still never feel that we know John as well as we should. 

The subject matter and the way Lawrence gradually creates the parallels among the three pairs of characters has much to recommend it, but the whole work, even at only 80 minutes, needs tightening and the privileging of Steffie as the only one to speak to us directly has to be justified. The kernel of a fascinating play lies within.  Let’s hope that Lawrence can more clearly expose it in future. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Mary Francis Moore and Virgilia Griffith. ©2015 the mcguffin company.

For tickets, visit http://fringetoronto.com.