Review - The Trouble with Mr. Adams - Tarragon Theatre, Toronto

✭✭✭✭✩

by Gord Rand, directed by Lisa Peterson

Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto

October 28-November 29, 2015

“The course of true love never did run smooth” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1)

Gord Rand’s latest play, The Trouble with Mr. Adams, now having its world premiere at the Tarragon Theatre, is an elegantly structured study of a man who is such an incurable romantic he can’t see that the rest of the world regards him and his love as perverted. The play is so filled with irony that we cannot apportion blame solely to Mr. Adams. Rather Rand forces us to assess in each of Adams’s three encounters with women where delusion ends and the truth begins. It’s a fascinating play, tautly directed with a stellar central performance by Chris Earle in the title role.

Gary Adams is a high school phys ed teacher in the Whitby area and coach of the girls volleyball team. His star player is Mercedes McPfefferidge (Sydney Owchar), whom he has been coaching since she was 13. Adams believes that Mercedes has enough talent that with his coaching she could go all the way to the Olympics. One day just before her 16th birthday, Mercedes missed the bus home from a tournament and Adams offered to give her a lift home. They were caught in a freak April blizzard and had to remain in the car together for several hours.

Adams learns from his wife Peggy (Philippa Domville) that Mercedes’s parents, their best friends, have brought a lawsuit against Adams alleging sexual misconduct with a minor. Adams is sure that once the parents learn from him that absolutely nothing happened, they will withdraw the suit. Unfortunately, that does not happen and Adams has to undergo a long session with the school-appointed lawyer Barbara (Allegra Fulton) to plan a strategy to get himself off and to keep the school’s reputation intact.

Rand has structured his play as three highly charged one-on-one encounters with the three women affected by his case – first with his wife when she learns the news, second with his lawyer before the trial, third with Mercedes herself after Adams has been tried. This beautifully lucid structure belies the murky world of moral greys in which the action plunges us.

The first thing Adams says when he greets his wife, both aged 45, at the start of the show is that he is leaving her. As Peggy, Domville in a powerful, complex performance that mixes ridicule with anger, hurt, regret and flirtation, assumes that Adams’s wish to leave is just the typical male response to a midlife crisis. Adams, however, is illuminated with the love he feels for Mercedes, a love that he claims has made him chaste and has morally transformed him. Because his love is so pure he expects Peggy along with Mercedes’ parents to understand him

when they realize that absolutely nothing of an untoward nature has ever occurred between him and his student.

Is this a charade? Is Adams deluding himself? Or are we to think that the rules of society are wrong in condemning an older man’s love for an underaged girl?

These questions only become more pressing and more insoluble when Adams has his meeting with his lawyer. As Barbara, Fulton gives a masterful performance in which her character’s disgust for and distrust of her client collides with her duty to find a ploy to save him. Throughout the scene Fulton’s acidic tone contrasts with the beatific optimism of Earle’s Mr. Adams and the basic question of whether he is or is not consciously lying about what happened.

We reach a resolution of sorts in the third scene between Adams and Mercedes. This happens on her 18th birthday. She is still playing volleyball, but not as well as she used to. As Rand has set up this meeting, we wait breathlessly to discover what Mercedes’ real attitude is toward Adams and finally what really happened in the snowbound car. As Mercedes, Owchar shows that Adams’s star player is filled with mixed feelings for Adams, though not so much about their previous relationship but what happened at the trial. Even though the third scene doesn’t quite have the same power as the previous two, the ending makes us feel as if we have witnessed a misguided man’s tragic downfall.

Through each of these encounters, Earle’s character does not change. That normally would be considered a flaw except that here Earle wonderfully keeps Mr. Adams’s basic character a mystery. Contrary to what we might expect, in each encounter it is Adams who radiates self-confidence and assurance, not the three women. Yet, Adams has to know that he has violated various standard protocols involving teachers and their students. At the same time, Rand deliberately places Mercedes on the verge of her 16th birthday when the alleged events took place to show the arbitrary nature of the law’s definition of 15 as “minor” and 16 as “adult”. Adams is so unfazed by standard rules of conduct because he believes that a true, chaste love should know no bounds and supersedes such arbitrary regulations. The way Earle projects Adams’s personality with such innocence and candour makes us wonder eventually whether the “trouble” with Mr. Adams does not involve truth and lies so much as reality and delusion.

Lisa Peterson, who happens to have directed Rand as completely contrasting character in Shaw’s The Philanderer at the Shaw Festival last year, directs the play with admirable clarity and tautness as well as an understanding of the ambiguity that underlies the action. This is a very intelligent play best seen with at least one other person because the questions it poses are ones you will want to debate long after the show is over.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

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

2015-10-31

The Trouble with Mr. Adams