Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✩✩✩
by Pamela Mala Sinha, directed by Alan Dilworth
Soulpepper, Young Centre, Toronto
September 10–October 17, 2015
Rosemary: “I’ve had enough drama for one night”
Pamela Mala Sinha’s first play Crash (2012), was a powerful solo play about a young woman dealing with having been sexually assaulted. Her second play and first multi-actor play Happy Place, now receiving its world premiere by Soulpepper, is a script in dire need of a dramaturg. The production boasts an all-female, all-star cast, but even all this massive combined talent cannot make Sinha’s fragmented, undramatic and inconclusive work compelling.
The action begins when Oyin Oladejo as Samira enters Lorenzo Savoini’s all-white box of a set and begins to slide open panels to reveal doorways, windows, a kitchen and more. Sinha toys with us for rather too long about what the nature of this place is and who the other women are who pass through it.
It turns out that Samina has entered a facility for women who have tried to commit suicide. Through a myriad of very short scenes we see random interactions between women and group activities organized by floor supervisor Louise (Deborah Drakeford). The scenes disclose in a painfully fragmentary fashion the reasons that brought these varied group of women to the facility.
There is Joyce (Caroline Gillis), who seems to have been there the longest and acts as if she were Louise’s right-hand woman. Although the women are supposed not to intrude on each other’s privacy, Joyce is the most shameless in prying and gossiping.
Nina, herself, is totally occupied with her pregnancy and is upset with Mildred’s constant accusations that she is not really pregnant. Rosemary (Irene Poole) who arrives after Samira is put off by the odd collection of women and the constant surveillance of the staff and is the least forthcoming about why she has come. The author herself plays Kathleen, a young woman grown cynical with suppressed anger.
The plot, if it can be called that, consists of the gradual teasing out of the stories of the six patients. Initially, Sinha makes Samira our primary focus as a new girl learning to accommodate herself to her strange surroundings. Samira tried to commit suicide after depression brought on by having been raped. Exactly like the main character in Sinha’s Crash, Samira’s memory of the incident comes back to her in fragments the main lacuna being what her attacker looked like. Sinha even allows Samira to address the audience directly, unlike the rest of the characters, as if to establish her primacy. Yet, as she delves into the lives of the other patients, she tends to leave Samira and the focus she gave behind.
The problem is that after two-and-a-half hours, we really don’t know any of the women well. We are given more or less the full stories for Joyce, Rosemary and Samira, but the information about Mildred is contradictory and far too vague concerning Nina and Kathleen. It is totally unclear why Mildred who has the biggest public breakdown of them all is able to leave the facility or why Kathleen feels she can leave while all the rest stay on.
If such confusion were not frustrating enough, the play, besides losing focus, has no forward momentum and does not move toward a conclusion. Instead, it simply ends. Samira finds out from Louise that a new girl has arrived, looks up and blackout. If that is supposed to mean something, what is it? Besides, Rosemary arrived after Samira and therefore is, in fact, the “new girl” in the group now, not Samira.
One reason why we never get to know the characters well enough is Sinha’s approach to the material. Sinha could easily reduce the running time of the play if she were to get rid of the needless mystery of what the facility is and why the women are there. What should this be a mystery? If Samira is a newcomer, Louise would have briefed her on what the place is, what its rules are and what her expectations are for Samira’s progress. Sinha omits any such scene even though it would realistically be part of the orientation of any new resident in any facility. Instead, she has Samira find out about the place piecemeal which is not only unrealistic but unduly lengthens the exposition. If the point of the play is to demystify clinical depression and cut through social sanctions against people who have attempted suicide, all this mystery is counterproductive.
Second, Sinha’s desire to tease out the stories of the six women not only lengthens the play but makes the six patients’ lives revolve solely around their attempted suicide. If we want to appreciate these women as fully rounded characters, Sinha somehow has to reveal to us what they were like before they descended into a suicidal depression. Sinha only gives us hints of this for Joyce and Samira. The others we know only as their depressed selves, from which it is impossible to extrapolate what their normal selves would be. As for the resident counsellor Louise, Sinha gives us no clue whether living among these women is a reward for her or not. Sinha gives Louise only one outburst decrying the women's’ lack of compassion for each other to help us understand Louise’s point of view.
Sinha has at least insured that the seven women are strongly differentiated in personality and director Alan Dilworth has insured that these differences are manifest in their speech patterns and body language. All seven give remarkably strong performances, but these are seven strong performance in search of a plot.
There are flaws not only in the play itself but in the production. Why is the set initially presented as a plain white box? Sinha makes no suggestion that the women are being used as lab rats. They’re not even on different kinds of antidepressants. Why does Dilworth have furniture magically appear behind a sliding panel upstage left for Oladejo to haul into the set? Nothing in the play suggests there is anything magical about the facility. Besides, why is it always Oladejo who has to act as in onstage ASM in hauling and arranging furniture? Is this some idea left over from when the action was to be seen only from Samira’s point of view?
The set is supposed principally to represent the facility’s kitchen-cum-lounge, but, as we discover, it sometimes also represents the courtyard of the building and individual rooms within it. Lighting designer Kimberly Purtell signals the courtyard scene with a leafy gobo projected onto the stage right side of the set where an upholstered sofa is. The first few times I assumed that we were were still inside and that the leaves were merely shadows cast through a window. Purtell also does not alter her lighting enough so that we know when we are in a private room instead of in the lounge. Confusion in production only amplifies the confusion inherent in the play.
It is possible to appreciate the ironically titled Happy Place for its extraordinary cast and for the cast’s uniformly excellent performances. Yet, in some ways, the cast’s strength only makes the experience of the play more frustrating since the material it has to work with gives it so little dramatically or thematically to work with.
There is a good play lurking somewhere within Happy Place, but Sinha has to be willing to go back to square one to rewrite it. Is the play meant merely to be a slice of life in a women’s suicide ward or is it meant to have a focus, dramatic shape and a conclusion? Until those essential points are determined, Happy Place as it now exists, is a script not yet ready for the stage.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Caroline Gillis, Irene Poole and Pamela Mala Sinha; Diane D'Aquila and Oyin Oladejo; Liisa Repo-Martell and Deborah Drakeford. ©2015 Cylla von Tiedemann.
2015-09-11
Happy Place