✭✭✭✭✭

by Dennis Kelly, directed by Birgit Schreyer Duarte

The Caretakers, The Storefront Theatre, Toronto

January 20-February 14, 2016

Dr. Millard: “None of this is the truth.  It’s just people saying things”

The Epimenides Paradox is this: “Epimenides the Cretan says, ‘All the Cretans are liars’”.  This paradox is essentially the subject of British writer Dennis Kelly’s fascinating play Taking Care of Baby from 2007.  Kelly has written his play in the form of verbatim theatre, a form of documentary theatre in which the script consists entirely of statements recorded of the actual participants involved in the incident under investigation.  Examples of this genre recently seen in Toronto include Alan Rickman’s My Name is Rachel Corrie in 2008, Annabel Soutar’s Seeds in 2012 and the musical London Road by A. Cork and Alecky Blythe in 2014.  The point of this type of theatre is that it is the closest representation of the truth by presenting real people’s words as they were actually spoken. 

Kelly’s play centres on the case of Donna McAuliffe, who is arrested and tried for having murdered her two infant children.  After months of incarceration Donna is released after an appeal by her mother Lynn supported by findings by the psychologist Dr. Millard that Donna suffers from a psychological disorder called LKS (Leeman-Keatley Syndrome).  The play consists of videotaped interviews and other documents obtained by Kelly from Donna, Lynn Dr. Millard and other people involved with them or the case.  The action proceeds chronologically through the events from Donna’s first interview in prison through her appeal and release concluding with a follow-up interview once the controversy has mostly died down, through Kelly will sometimes interleave interviews to allow us to compare the information in them. 

The main trick of the play is that everything in the play, including LKS, is fictitious.  The Caretakers, the company staging the play, gives it the subtitle “A Fake Documentary” and the announcement preceding each of the four acts disintegrates from “The following has been taken word for word from interviews and correspondence” before Act 1 into gibberish before Act 4. 

So what are we to make of a play that asserts its veracity in style and form but is really a fiction?  First, Kelly’s play is a parody of verbatim drama by suggesting that once an event has been made into a stage play it is simply theatre no matter what its source may be.  Kelly also depicts the unseen interviewer as phrasing questions in certain ways so that he will get just the wording he wants for his play. 

Second, Kelly’s play is a satire on exploitation.  Four characters are revealed as actively exploiting Donna’s story for their own gain.  One is the author “Dennis Kelly”, heard (as voiced by Richard Clarkin) but unseen, whom Martin McAuliffe (Dylan Trowbridge) outright accuses of exploiting his wife suffering for people’s “entertainment”.  Another is Donna’s mother Lynn (Astrid Van Wieren), who is running for political office.  She uses her personal campaign to overturn her daughter’s conviction both because a daughter in prison is bad for her image and because it is a means of attracting sympathetic publicity to her political campaign.  The third is Dr. Millard (Richard Clarkin), who diagnoses Donna with LKS after only one session with her in order to popularize his diagnosis and with it his clinic that treats such patients.  And the fourth, most obviously, is a tabloid journalist (Craig Lauzon) who has used his coverage of Donna’s case to break out of local into national news coverage. 

Third, Kelly’s play, despite its parody of genre and theme of exploitation, tells a story that is genuinely affecting.  From first to last, we are caught up in the question of whether Donna did or did not kill her children and, if she did, why she did so.  This story itself is so heart-wrenching that it makes those who would exploit it, including “Dennis Kelly”, look even more callous.  The story also proves what theatregoers have known for millennia that a story does not have to be true to be gripping. 

Director Birgit Schreyer Duarte uses prerecorded and live video shown on two television screens along with Steve Lucas’s often deliberately harsh lighting to help create the feeling of a documentary.  She also seats Trowbridge as Martin in the audience as if to show that his objections to exploiting Donna’s story should also be our own.  Strangely, since Kelly has already got us hooked on Donna’s story, we react in just the opposite way and are angered that anyone would withhold information from us.  By this means, Duarte makes us complicit in exploiting Donna’s story since we are consuming it as entertainment.

The only other actor to play only one character is Astrid Van Wieren as Lynn.  In contrast to Donna’s hidden depths, Lynn seems to be all surface.  Van Wieren shows us there are depths to Lynn, but ones she uses alcohol to forget.  Initially, we are on Lynn’s side as a mother who believes her daughter is wrongfully accused of murder.  But as the action progresses and we come to see she will do anything not to lose her political race, we start to question her motivation.  Even when Lynn is celebrating her increasing victories, Van Wieren always suggests that something akin to guilt underlies her forced happiness.

We have a similar change of reaction to Richard Clarkin’s Dr. Millard.  Clarkin makes Millard very persuasive when he explains LKS, a form of postpartum depression in which women who have recently had babies are overwhelmed by the barrage of negative news they receive from information outlets and kill their babies to spare them from the horrors of modern life.  Dr. Millard is eminently articulate in contrast to someone like Donna, but he also comes across as a bit too slick and his theory as opportunistic.  Clarkin well conveys the notion that Millard is not just spreading information but also promoting himself.

Dylan Trowbridge plays two roles – Jim, Lynn’s superficial campaign manager, and Martin, Donna’s estranged husband.  He is effective in both, but he is outstanding as Martin, a man filled with anger, doubt and guilt, who fears that Donna really did kill their two children.  When he finally gives testimony it is extraordinarily painful.

It is luxury casting to have Caroline Gillis play two small roles – a waitress and Dr. Millard’s wife – but she is makes a strong impression as both.  As Mrs. Millard, she first takes on the typical “stand-by-your-man” attitude of so many women whose husbands come under media fire.  But as the unseen interviewer’s questions continue, she shows that Dr. Millard has kept his wife in the dark about most of his research and she begins to ask him anxiously the same questions. 

Craig Lauzon differentiates his two characters that you would hardly know they were played by the same actor.  His role as the sleazy sex-addicted tabloid journalist is rather easy.  But his depiction of Brian, a Labour Party representative to wants to woo Lynn to its side is delightfully eccentric.  Lauzon portrays Brian as outwardly gigglingly ineffectual but secretly calculating in forcing Lynn to draw her own conclusions that she should switch party affiliation from Conservative to Labour.    

If people are looking for a straightforward murder mystery or true crime drama, Taking Care of Baby is not it.  Its fictional portrait of a woman in extreme duress, not just unaided but used by all of those closest to her, is truly chilling.  The fact that we do not find out for sure what the truth is is disturbing and left for the audience to decide in their own minds by weighing the evidence presented.  Why, for instance, does Donna resent her mother so much even though Lynn’s appeal using the LKS defence helped get her out of prison?  Donna’s follow-up interview after the media storm has died down is even more unsettling when we find out how she defines being “happy”.

Taking Care of Baby is powerful, complex drama directed with insight and acted with passion.  It’s a show any lover of contemporary theatre should not miss.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Miranda Calderon as Donna; Dylan Trowbridge as Martin; Miranda Calderon as Donna and Astrid Van Wieren as Lynn. ©2016 John Gundy.

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