✭✭✭✩✩ / ✭✭✭✩✩ 

by George F. Walker, directed by Wes Berger

CrazyLady, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto

April 23-May 17, 2015

“Teachers Teaching Parents Parenting”

George F. Walker has begun a new cycle of plays called “After Class” with a double bill of two one-acters – the Toronto premiere of Parents Night and the world premiere of The Bigger Issue.  On the evidence of the production by CrazyLady at Theatre Passe Muraille, the new cycle is off to a rather shaky start.  Though each play is only 65 minutes long, they both outstay their welcome by about 20 minutes, and the second play covers much of the same territory as the first.

Of the two plays, Parents Night that starts off the evening is by far the more successful.  A Grade 3 teacher Nicole (Sarah Murphy-Dyson) on her last day of teaching has visits from two parents complaining about how she is teaching their children.  The first is John (Matthew Olver), bigoted and self-assured, who complains that Nicole is not dealing with his son’s anger issues.  In fact, he thinks she is exacerbating them by forcing him to have a Naomi, a Korean-Canadian, as his reading partner since “Na O-Mi” (as he insists on pronouncing it) is so much better that it makes his son feel inferior.

The second parent is Rosie (Dana Puddicombe), who is dressed like a hooker and talks like one but is really a stripper and lap-dancer that John has met before.  Rosie complains that Nicole treats her daughter as if she is stupid, which Nicole denies, but Nicole does say that Rosie should not let her 8-year-old wear makeup to school. 

Nicole is already at the end of her rope when she gets the new that her mother has died.  that ends her tolerance for dealing with the petty problems these parents who refuse to listen to her.  Walker goes a step too far in having Nicole resort to alcohol and Xanax to cope with her bad news since it only lengthens the action and Nicole seems to snap out of stupor rather quickly when Walker wants her to. 

A point is that the façades of all three characters crumble.  We find out about the past histories of all three with John and Rosie finally admitting that their parenting rather than Nicole’s teaching techniques have led to her children’s behavioural difficulties.  All this was evident about halfway through the play, but Walker keeps bringing forward more background about the characters, especially Rosie, right up until the very end when he can no longer integrate it into the action.  In fact, the play does not reach a conclusion as do most Walker plays.  Instead, Kirsten Watt’s light fades out while the characters are speaking as if Walker could not think of how to end the play.  The fade-out while characters are speaking is an old sitcom technique familiar from such shows as I Love Lucy.  It is fine in a sitcom when we know we’ll see the same characters again, but it bizarre to see it used in a stage play.

Like Parents Night, The Bigger Issue is also set in a classroom but this time we have moved to to Grade 7.  The action begins with the school principal Irene (Murphy-Dyson) is trying to prepare new teacher Suzy (Julia Heximer) for the arrival of the mother of a boy injured in a playground incident.  According to Suzy the boy was threatening a girl to such an extent that Suzy felt she had to intervene and pushed the boy away.  Soon Maggie (Puddicombe), the irate mother, arrives and informs the two women that she is a lawyer and expects to see Suzy if not both of the women fired over the assault on her son.  Once the women leave to consult, Maggie’s husband Jack (Olver) turns up and we learn that she and Jack are living in a house without electricity and counting on the vegetables they grow in their garden for food.  Not only that, Jack is a nightwatchman in a warehouse and Maggie is only pretending to be a lawyer. 

Walker tries to draw comedy from Maggie’s deception, Jack’s nerdishness, Suzy’s fear and Irene’s cynicism, but fundamentally the situation, padded out with description of too much off-stage action, is not comic.  We lear that Maggie and Jack were homeless for five years and even now have to resort to petty theft to keep going.  Their son’s story is gruesome and explains his behavioural problems.  Maggie has only pretended to be a lawyer because she feels that the teachers would not take her seriously if they knew she was was jobless and recently homeless. 

If case we do not get Walker’s point, Walker has both Irene and Maggie deliver mini-lectures.  Irene points out the plight of teachers, underpaid, overworked, expected to provide the parenting that parents used to provide and blamed for any infraction counter to a parent’s wishes.  Maggie points out the plight of the homeless, the loss of respect, the depression, the difficulty of going on, the fear of social services who might take away their child. 

This descent into pure didacticism is unnecessary and Walker ends this play the same unsatisfactory way as he did Parents Night, with more and more background material being aired while the lights fade-out on the characters speaking. 

It is good that a playwright has taken up the defence of teachers who do not receive the respect they should in society and that he points out how their job has become more difficult with parents’ increasing denial that they have any duties in raising children.  As usual, Walker defends those that society looks down upon, like strippers and the homeless, even though it created the situations that cause them to exist.  Nevertheless, all this was covered in Parent’s Night and The Bigger Issue adds little to it. 

Director Wes Berger has not helped the actors develop a uniform style of performance.  Sara Murphy-Dyson is excellent in a naturalistic style in Parents Night, detailing the progressive stresses on Nicole’s niceness level until it eventually crumbles.  In The Bigger Issue, she tries rather too hard to create a harden persona as Irene to contrast with the nice Nicole, and is already near the point of blowing up from when we first meet her, thus leaving her character little room to develop.

Matthew Olver seems to play both his roles as if he were in extended Second City sketches, that is, as much to the audience as to the other characters.  Still, he is much more believable as Jack in the second play than as John in the first, but that is partly because Jack is a more believable character.

Dana Puddicombe is the one who best suits Walker’s style of overheated satire.  She is hilarious in both plays.  Even though Rosie and Maggie are similar in presenting a tough stance that later breaks down, Puddicombe manages to make the characters distinct and have them dial back their aggression in different ways eventually achieving a large measure of sympathy from us in both.

Julia Heximer is good as the terrified teacher even though her character is inconsistent in suddenly developing aggressive tendencies she didn’t have before. While Heximer is vocally convincing, her gestures tend to be more stagey than natural.

Berger has the actors rattle off Walker’s lines at a machine-gun pace which has the unwanted effect of emphasizing the overall the pays give as live sitcoms.  There are certainly lots of laughs to be had, but a certain exhaustion does set in as Walker proceeds far too often to hit the same nails on the head as if unsure that he has driven the points far enough in.  Given that he is already preaching the the converted, he doesn’t really need to treat is as if we’re idiots.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Matthew Olver, Sarah Murphy-Dyson, Dana Puddicombe; Sarah Murphy-Dyson, Matthew Olver, Dana Puddicombe, Julia Heximer. ©2015 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.crazylady.info.