Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✭✭✩
written and directed by Mark Cassidy
Young People’s Theatre, Toronto
April 16-May 2, 2015
“A Box of Happiness”
Young People’s Theatre is currently presenting the world premiere of Emily’s Piano, a play for those aged 10 and up that deals with important issues in a more mature way than many plays written for adults. The play is adapted by Mark Cassidy from the 2003 novel La Boîte à bonheur by Québécois author Charlotte Gingras translated by Susan Ouriou. A play about a young girl coping with her mother’s depression may not sound like it could hold the attention of young people, but Mark Cassidy’s direction that combines physical with spoken theatre ensures that it does.
The 75-minute-long play opens with a wordless prelude in which the cast dismantle a (prop) grand piano. Everything from the keys, the black sides and the insides is put in boxes and carried off and the metal plate is hoist aloft. This scene is symbolic of the destruction of the comfortable lives of Emily (Hilary Carroll) and her mother (Heather Marie Annis) when Emily’s father (Christopher Sawchyn) decides they need to downsize and move into a smaller apartment. Emily’s two sisters (Ginette Mohr and Mary Ellen MacLean) have married and have children of their own, so there is no need for Emily and her parents to have such a large house and no room for the piano which was an heirloom in her mother’s family.
The first problem is that Emily’s mother was a concert pianist and used to give lessons. Now she has nothing to do and without the piano has no creative outlet. The second problem is that Emily’s dad is having an affair with a female co-worker, a fact he denies until near the end of the play. These two problems cause Emily’s mother to sink into depression. She barely eats, barely sleeps and her impulse to creativity takes an absurd turn when she feels compelled to paint everything in the new house with gold paint. (It turns out that the mother’s favourite performance dress was in gold.) Emily’s two sisters are too preoccupied to help. In fact, they both use Emily as their babysitter so that they can pursue other activities. Even Emily’s grandmother has been put into a home.
Realizing that her sisters are asking her to baby-sit too much, Emily refuses to work for them anymore. Emily’s solution for her mother is to find out who bought her mother’s piano and where it is. When one sister refers to the old grand piano as “a box of happiness”, it looks like the play will rather simplistically equate finding the piano with finding the family’s lost happiness again. Unfortunately, were that to be true, the story would be far too unrealistic.
As it happens Emily does find the piano and its discovery does not magically solve all the problems in her family. It does, however, makes things better and gives Emily’s mother a purpose again that she had lost.
It is very bold of a play for young people to take on such topics as depression and the unfaithfulness of a parent, but Gingras’s book and Cassidy’s adaption deal with these with taste and sensitivity. It will likely be a help to any children in the audience who have to deal with these issues to see them played out on stage and help them realize they are not alone in these experiences.
Emily both narrates the action and takes part in it. Hillary Carroll is a natural, unpretentious actor, with whom children should easily identify. It would be good if she could produce a fuller tone and could project more so that the level of her vocal production were the same as the other actors. She does not present Emily in a Polyanna-ish way at all, rather emphasizing Emily’s empathy with her mother and strong will to do something to help her.
Heather Marie Annis gives a very realistic portrayal of depression and children who don’t know much about this may wonder what is wrong with her character or think that she is simply sad. Of course, she is sad – just all the time. Still, even children will likely recognize that painting a bare stick gold to be a Christmas tree means that the mother is not thinking clearly. Fortunately, the play has a flashback to what family life used to be like and Annis gets to show us the mother in an entirely different light. At the end too, she very touchingly shows how someone who has been so unhappy for so long gratefully, almost meekly accepts the new chance at happiness she is offered.
It’s very hard not to view the father as the villain of the play. The harsh way Christopher Sawchyn delivers the father’s lines reinforces this notion. It would be a help if Cassidy could make us privy to the father’s thinking both about downsizing and about how his affections came to veer away from his wife. It would be good were he to acknowledge his affair as his fault and ask Emily’s forgiveness.
Ginette Mohr and Mary Ellen MacLean come close to being like the selfish older sisters in Cinderella, but at least Cassidy has them acknowledge that something is going wrong with their mother even if they are too “busy” to do anything about it. MacLean becomes almost unrecognizable in her turn as a kindly old piano tuner and Mohr sets aside all her abrasiveness as Emily’s sister to take on the grace and warmheartedness of the nun who bought the piano.
In short, Emily’s Piano is a fine play about difficult topics that is certain to produce a complex response in it audience. They will surely want to talk about what they have seen to understand it better and that will be all to the good.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Heather Marie Annis, Ginette Mohr, Mary Ellen MacLean, Christopher Sawchyn and Hilary Carroll; Hilary Carroll & Heather Marie Annis. ©2015 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.youngpeoplestheatre.ca.
2015-04-19
Emily's Piano