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by Jordi Mand, directed by Sarah Garton Stanley

Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto

April 5-24, 2016

“Contrived”

After Jordi Mand’s thrilling play Between the Sheets in 2012, audiences will have high expectation for the world premiere of her latest play Caught.  Both hour-long plays begin with what seems like a straightforward encounter and both move forward via a series of unexpected twists and turns deriving from the gradual revelation of withheld information.  The problem is that in Between the Sheets the withheld information was believable whereas in Caught it is not.  Also, the action in Caught merely stops rather than reaches a satisfying conclusion.  The stunning production design and fine acting can’t disguise the contrivance inherent in the material.

Like Between the Sheets, Caught also begins with an apparently mundane situation.  Department store security guard Trisha (Sabryn Rock) has caught teenager James Murphy (Jakob Ehman) redhanded shoplifting more than $2000 worth of miscellaneous goods.  In the store’s security holding room where all the action is set, James does not deny putting the goods in his backpack, but he does deny stealing them.  Trisha is naturally confused by this distinction and by James’s apparent lack of concern about the seriousness of his crime.  She is even more confused when James tells her that he took all the goods in order to meet her.

The rather crucial point of why exactly James wants to meet Trisha unfortunately is never made clear.  At first, Mand leads us to believe that James has some kind of crush on Trisha and felt that he could only get her attention by shoplifting.  Later, when Trisha calls in the policeman Dan (Meegwun Fairbrother), his motivation seems to change completely.  Without giving away the plot, the unanswered question is whether James’s first motive is his primary motive that he then changes when embarrassed by Dan’s entry or whether his second motive was his primary motive all along.  Given that sudden ending, we just don’t know.

It’s very difficult to explain how Mand’s plot twists are contrived without giving them away, yet one can say that inconsistencies one notes early on only lead to greater inconsistencies later.  James’s seeming attempts to flirt with Trisha end abruptly when Dan makes his appearance.  Since James is uncooperative, Trisha tries to contact Dan several times, especially when James says he needs to use the washroom and therefore requires a male to escort him there.  To delay Dan’s arrival, Mand shows that Trisha’s walkie-talkie gets poor reception because of where Dan is in the building.  Yet, Mand also shows that both Trish’s and James’s cellphones work just fine.  Why, then, does Trisha keep trying to use her nonfunctioning walkie-talkie when she could phone Dan on his cellphone or at least phone someone to get Dan for her?  The reason is that if Mand doesn’t delay Dan’s entry the show would be only 30 minutes long and the fairly obvious point she wants to make about injustice would stand out even more baldly than it already does. 

Second, Mand makes much of the fact that James will not give Trisha the permission she needs to open his wallet to take down his personal details for her form.  Eventually, James tells her his name and some details but not his address.  James says that he has seen Trisha many times before, but she insists she has never seen him.  Yet, when Dan, whom Trisha knows, sees James’s name, he immediately knows who James is.  Since, for reasons I won’t reveal, Trisha must know who James father is both from her own experience and from hearing Dan’s complaints about him, we have to wonder why Dan immediately puts two and two together and Trisha does not. 

Third, Trisha is haunted by an incident she witnessed where a man physically assaulted his wife in the store damaging store property.  Why the man was not arrested then, if not for the assault then at least for damaging property is unexplained.  The trouble is that the non-arrest in the publicly witnessed event has to be unexplained if Mand’s plot is going to work.  In both Between the Sheets and in Caught, Mand is interested in laws and social conventions and how those with power can manipulate rules to their own advantage.  The problem with Caught is that the situation becomes so artificial that it negates the point she wants to make.

Designer John Thompson has created one of the most effective sets seen in the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace.  Thompson has made an all-white holding room that takes up the front half of the Backspace playing area, with a single door in the wall that opens onto an anonymous basement corridor beyond.  Thompson gives the stage opening a foot-wide surround suggesting the fourth wall so that we feel as if we are looking at the action through a huge plate-glass window.  This makes the interview room not only feel even more claustrophobic but gives us the feeling we are secretly observing the action.  This idea cleverly ties in with Trisha’s job of secretly observing customers in a store and with James’s accusation that Trisha is a voyeur. 

Director Sarah Garton Stanley has the action unfold with close attention to naturalistic detail.  Jakob Ehman gives an excellent performance as James.  Ehman allows us to think at first that James is just a clueless teen who has harboured a bizarre fascination for Trisha.  Eventually, our view changes since James seems to be getting more information out of Trisha than she out of him – an unrealistic situation, but that’s how Mand has written it.  Upon Dan’s arrival, Ehman shows us a completely different side of the teenager, filled with threats and obvious play-acting.  Trisha tells Dan that James is “psychotic”, but Ehman has given James’s behaviour enough underlying consistency that we realize his deviousness is cold and calculated.   

Sabryn Rock gives such a warm portrayal of Trisha that she gains our sympathy right from the beginning.  When the play later attempts to question our initial view of Trisha as a good woman simply trying to do her job by the rules, it’s very hard for us to change our opinion since Rock has succeed so well for a half hour in placing us on her side.  Later when evidence of Trisha’s unusual behaviour comes out, we still don’t waver in our support both because of the sense of conviction Rock has projected and because the accusations against Trisha seem so implausible. 

Meegwun Fairbrother’s character Dan is much more schematic.  Mand gives us only a handful of facts about him and nothing more.  Nevertheless, Fairbrother has a strong stage presence and when he enters the room an aura of power enters with him.  Yet, Fairbrother is able to reveal that Dan’s façade surprisingly hides inner fear and weakness.

We might be able to appreciate Caught simply for its unexpected plot developments, contrived or not.  But Mand compounds the problem of contrivance but not supplying a satisfying ending.  Much is suggested about Trisha’s life outside of work, but we feel we need to know more in order to judge whatever she has done properly.  Mand’s ending is also based on certain assumptions about how James’s father will react to James’s arrest that may not be true.  Simply to freeze the action for an ending resolves neither of these issues and makes us feel as if we’ve seen only the first half of a play.  Ultimately, the fine cast, clever production and tight direction only serve to indicate that the source of our dissatisfaction lies in the play itself.                          

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Sabryn Rock, Meegwun Fairbrother and Jakob Ehman; Sabryn Rock, Jakob Ehman and Meegwun Fairbrother. ©2016 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit http://passemuraille.ca.