Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✭✩
by David French, directed by Ravi Jain
Factory Theatre, Panasonic Theatre, Toronto
October 17-29, 2017
Jacob: “There’s never been a night like this before, and there'll never be another!”
Salt-Water Moon is a beautiful evening of pure romance. David Mirvish has done Toronto a favour by presenting a remount of Ravi Jain’s radically re-imagined version of David French’s Canadian classic from 1984. Mirvish audiences may not be used to minimalism as a theatrical style, but Jain’s minimalist approach to French’s play brings out the very best in this deeply romantic work. Once having seen Salt-Water Moon staged with such elegant simplicity, it is hard to imagine seeing it any other way.
I have previously found it difficult to enjoy French’s play because in structure it is so similar to Lanford Wilson’s play Talley’s Folly which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979. Salt-water Moon and Talley’s Folly are both prequels to other plays and both part of family trilogies, the Talley Trilogy for Wilson, the Mercer Trilogy for French. Both are 90-minute two-person plays set at night in a small town while everyone else is otherwise preoccupied – with a wake in French, with July 4th in Wilson. In both a man has returned after a year’s absence determined to win over the girl he left behind. The shadow of World War II hangs over Wilson’s play, World War I over French’s. French’s play is about the sheer bravado of Jacob Mercer (Kawa Ada) in winning over Mary Snow (Mayko Nguyen), who seems to have become engaged to the son of his father’s enemy just to spite him. In Wilson, the couple is divided by religion, class, age and most of all by painful secrets each feels will nullify the possibility for love. In French, the couple is divided by misapprehensions over why Jacob left so suddenly and why Mary has become engaged. With so much more subtext, it is not hard to see Wilson’s as the richer play.
Yet, the advantage that French’s play has over Wilson’s is the sheer poetry of the language. And the advantage Jain’s production has over all previous productions of French’s play is that it places its emphasis so completely on French’s language. When you enter the Panasonic Theatre, all you see is a stool with a guitar and a music stand and the empty all-black stage strewn with small bowls containing votive candles. Ania Soul sings melancholy songs about heart break while accompanying herself on the guitar. Mayko Nguyen, who will play Mary Snow, lights the small candles while Soul sings. The effect is to create a transition from the hectic world outside the theatre to the mood of quiet, intense emotion of the play.
The action begins when Soul, acting as a narrator, not a role in French’s original script, says the title of the play and reads the stage directions, a process that will continue throughout the play’s 90 minutes. What we note is the great specificity of the realistic set and costumes that French demands and how Jain has done away with all of those specifics. French may have conceived of Salt-Water Moon as a Newfoundland play set in Coley’s Point in 1926, but Jain has stripped away all that is peculiar to that one time and place in order to universalize French’s story. For that same reason he has gathered a cast of fine non-Caucasian actors to play roles originally conceived for an all-Caucasian cast. All props – Mary’s telescope, Jacob’s suitcase – are mimed and Jacob and Mary wear contemporary clothing at complete variance with the period costume French describes.
In Jain’s hands the play thus becomes a confrontation of two embodied souls where one uses all the power of his words to persuade the other to join with him in marriage for all eternity and the other uses all the power of her words to test him and fend him off. French’s play specifies that it is a starry night, but here the stars seem to be all the candles Mary has lit on her quasi-ritualistic circuit of the stage. When the discussion turns to a red star in the sky, Mary lights the only candle in a red glass bowl.
The key to making this play work in is finding two actors who are equally strong so that the struggle between them is even and the odds of Jacob winning Mary over look increasing doubtful as the play progresses. That is exactly what Jain has in Kawa Ada as Jacob and Mayko Nguyen as Mary. Ada’s Jacob is outward-directed, playful and funny while Nguyen’s Mary is inward-directed, concerned and serious. For much of the play we see how Jacob tries one approach after another to see how he can get through to Mary and to make her budge from her resolution to marry the man she is engaged to even if she does not love him. Nguyen shows subtly but clearly that every time she pushes Jacob away she feels almost as much pain as he does.
The impulse for Jacob to tear down Mary’s defences and for Mary to preserve them is pride. Ada and Nguyen leave no doubt that Jacob and Mary love each other. What engages us is the way they battle and the question of how the two will ever be able to overcome the pride that stands in the way of their happiness.
With set and props stripped away the couple’s struggle is placed in a symbolic landscape. The rest of the town is at a wake. Both Mary and Jacob’s fathers died in World War I. Mary’s mother has become demented. Her sister is imprisoned in a cruel home for abandoned children. Mary is about to unite herself with a man she doesn’t love. All around Mary and Jacob are images of death, restriction and madness while they gaze at the infinite freedom of the sky above. Only the recognition of this mutual love can save them from the confines of time and space.
This is a great production of what is French’s most popular play and by focussing on French’s poetic language Jain highlights the play’s greatest asset. In 1998 I happened to see a similar minimalistic approach to a Canadian classic in Yves Desgagnés’ production of Marcel Dubé’s Un Simple Soldat (1958) for the Compagnie Jean-Duceppe. In presenting a play renowned for its kitchen sink realism, Desgagnés retained the kitchen sink but nothing else, so that, as in Jain’s production of French, the focus shifted to the character’s language of changing emotions as they battled for control and acceptance. Seeing how beautifully effective Jain’s direction is in Salt-Water Moon, one wonders how many other once-renowned realistic Canadian plays would benefit from this minimalist approach, an approach that helps us see past the externals of Canadian stories to what at bottom is most essential and universal.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Kawa Ada as Jacob Mercer and Mayko Nguyen as Mary Snow; Ania Soul, Musician, Kawa Ada and Mayko Nguyen. ©2017 Joseph Michael.
For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.
2017-10-18
Salt-Water Moon