Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✭✭✩
by David Mamet, directed by Benjamin Blais
Red One Theatre Collective, The Storefront Theatre, Toronto
November 6-22, 2015
Edmond: “When we fear things I think that we wish for them”
The Red One Theatre Collective with the Storefront Arts Initiative is currently presenting a powerful and imaginative production of David Mamet’s play Edmond from 1982. Edmond is not at all what people might consider a typical Mamet play like American Buffalo from 1975 or like Glengarry Glen Ross from 1983. Though only 75 minutes long, it has 23 scenes, a large cast, only one central character and it deals explicitly with the theme of destiny. Edmond is a modern urban fable, rather like Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1836) but updated to the New York City of 1982. The direction of Benjamin Blais is punchy and inventive and Tim Fitzgerald Walker’s performance as the title character is outstanding.
Though the scenes in Edmond are all naturalistic with the kind of tough language we expect from Mamet, the action begins in a very non-naturalistic manner. Edmond, a completely ordinary, middle-aged, middle-class, white male, visits a fortune-teller (voiced by Karen Knox but made mysterious by being unseen), who tells him he is a “special person” and has a destiny to fulfil. This is obviously a one-size-fits-all kind of prophesy, but Edmond takes it to heart and decides that he will be himself and do whatever he decides to do. If Edmond were more philosophically inclined, he might say along with existentialists that he wants to live more “authentically”.
His first deed in ridding his life of lies is to tell his wife of many years (Gabrielle Lazarovitz) , that no longer loves her and no longer finds her attractive. In his only misstep, Blais mitigates the harshness of truth-telling by having Lazarovitz play the wife as a shrew. Her lines could be delivered in quite a different, quieter and more astonished manner, to make clear that the wife has given Edmond no cause for these remarks.
Freed of his wife, he enters the urban jungle of New York to find himself. A Man in Bar (Jeff Hanson) tells Edmond where can go for sex. The first B-Girl he encounters (played by Amanda B. Cordner with the right amount of sass) is frustrated when Edmond seems more content to debate her financial arrangement with the establishment than to get down to business. Humorously innocent as he is, Edmond discovers that the capitalism and exploitation he dislikes in the respectable workaday world of New York is even more rampant in its nocturnal subculture devoted to sex, booze and drugs. Edmond’s next two encounters also end because Edmond objects to fees demanded. The first is with a Peepshow Girl (sympathetically played by Pauline Bédarida), and the second with a gorgeous Whore (given a complex mixture of seductiveness and anger by Olivia Marshman).
Edmond sees he needs more money but the unregulated activities of a Pawnbroker (Matthew Gouveia) and a Card Sharp (also Gouveia) only increase his mounting frustration so that when he meets a fraudulent Pimp (Randel D’Souza) his frustration turns to violence. A misunderstanding with a Woman on the Street (well played by Lazarovitz) leads to verbal and physical assault.
Finally, with the waitress Glenna (Christie Stewart), who accepts his proposal of a simple one-night stand, we think Edmond may have found the right woman for him and for free. Edmond thinks this too, and tries to encourage her to liberate her self of social inhibitions. The limitations of both characters are revealed when all they can thinks of doing is admitting out loud that they are racist and homophobic. When Glenna tells Edmond she is an “actress” and he finds she is only studying acting, he wants her to proclaim the truth that she is not an actress. Understandably offended, Glenna asks Edmond to leave. This further rejection reignites his frustration and anger that leads to a tragic altercation.
The play ends with what seems at first an extraordinarily ironic twist when Edmond does and thinks things that seem to negate both his prejudices and the quest for freedom he embarked on. On reflection, however, it is possible to see the ending not as a contradiction but a fulfilment. Mamet even has Edmond nearly quote Shakespeare’s Hamlet when he says, “There is a destiny that shapes our end. . . rough-hew them how we may”. And what has Edmond learned? He has discovered, “When we fear things I think that we wish for them ... every fear hides a wish”.
Benjamin Blais shows great insight into the play. He realizes that the tone changes with the action – beginning as comic and moving through tragedy into irony. To have imposed a single tone on the play would have been a disaster since the play depends on our having a highly ambiguous view of the main character. Like Büchner’s Woyzeck, he is essentially a innocent whose brutish nature circumstance have let loose. In a strange way, Edmond is luckier than Woyzeck since after a taste of the unregulated real world Edmond does not suffer a mental collapse but is able to enter a world that is even more regulated than the one he left.
The power of Tim Fitzgerald Walker’s performance is that he truly does come across an an Everyman rather than as an actor pretending to be ordinary. Like Blais, Walker also understands and reflects the wide emotional arc of the story and is able fully to mine the humour of Edmond’s initial prudish naiveté as well as to find later on the selfish animal nature that underlies it. Walker allows us to laugh at, then revile and then pity Edmond’s ignorance. This is a great accomplishment in playing a character like Edmond who, with two major exceptions, is more passive than active.
The production for Edmond is also well conceived. Bronwen Lily has turned one end of the Storefront Theatre’s mutable space into a kind of proscenium theatre, but with three sets of narrowing legs. The legs allow the cast to create street scenes of New Yorkers pushing past each other on the sidewalk, with quick changes in the wings. During these street scenes, tightly choreographed by Ashleigh Powell, the actors surreptitiously set up props for the next scene so when the sidewalk clears we’ve changed location. In this way the 23 scenes flow seamlessly from one to the other. Adding to the atmosphere of the big city are Carter Hayden’s exciting riffs on drums at the very back of the stage.
The atypical nature of the play in Mamet’s oeuvre along with its requirement of a large cast and numerous set changes, means that Edmond is infrequently staged. Fans of Mamet should rush to see it. Yet, with an ideal Edmond in Walker, the fine support of the entire cast in multiple roles and the inventive direction of Blais, this production will appeal to any lover of thought-provoking theatre.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Jeff Hanson, Matthew Gouveia, Gabbie Lazarovitz, Tim Fitzgerald Walker, Olivia Marshman, Amanda B Cordner; Tim Fitzgerald Walker and Pauline Bédarida; Tim Fitzgerald Walker and Christie Stewart. ©2015 John Gundy.
For tickets, visit http://thestorefronttheatre.com.
2015-11-09
Edmond