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written and directed by Rob Kempson

timeshare productions, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto

March 16-25, 2017

“High School Is Other People”

Rob Kempson’s new play Trigonometry is a metaphor in search of significance.  Running only 75 minutes the play feels much longer because the plot is so improbable and the dialogue is so repetitive.  Given the title and the fact that there are only three characters, we get that the play will involve some sort of triangle, but Kempson belabours the point to no real purpose.  Then suddenly the play stops without resolving any of the issues.

The most famous play to depict three people caught in a triangular relationship for all eternity is of course Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (Huis-Clos) of 1944.  There Sartre depicts hell as being caught in an insoluble triangle of desire.  Garcin is attracted to Inès who is attracted to Estelle who is attracted to Garcin.  The desire of all three is unrequited.  The point of the play is to reveal the divine order as a malevolent bureaucracy which punishes sinners by deliberately sequestering them in frustratingly insoluble relationships such as those of the three characters.  The metaphor is laid bare in the play’s most famous line, “Hell is other people” (“L’enfer, c’est des autres”). 

Kempson’s play does much the same thing except that he has no existential or metaphysical point to make.  Susan (Alison Deon) is a high school supply teacher whose present assignment is as a guidance counsellor.  She is single and pregnant by choice.  She is meant to discover which other boys may have been involved in a hazing ritual that has already caused most of the school’s male volleyball team to be expelled. 

Her best friend at this particular high school is Gabriella (Rose Napoli).  Gabriella is incensed that the school wants to adopt a new sex-ed curriculum that would include mention of homosexuality and oral and anal sex.  She’s so worried about her 12-year-old daughter finding about about anything sexual that she has kept her out of school.  Meanwhile, Gabriella is celebrating her divorce from her husband by going on dates with guys she meets on Tinder.  Gabriella’s hypocrisy is obvious, but that doesn’t stop Kempson from extending the scene until after we’ve got the idea. 

The third character is the student Jackson (Daniel Ellis), who is adopted and has been happily raised by his two dads.  The problem is that he is failing Gabriella’s trigonometry class and he needs a good grade from her so that he can qualify for a basketball scholarship to university.  Rather than asking for extra help or hiring a tutor, Kempson has Jackson concoct a wildly elaborate scheme with no sure hope of success to blackmail Gabriella into raising his mark.  Gabriella in retaliation claims to have information that could get Jackson expelled.  This scene also goes on long past the point where we get what is happening, mostly because Kempson makes previously sharp Gabriella suddenly incredibly dim-witted. 

After another surprising and improbable revelation, heavily reliant on coincidence, Kempson leaves us with his three characters, Jackson capable of blackmailing both Gabriella and Susan and they in turn capable of blackmailing him, none able, however, to carry out their threats.  Then the play ends. 

Given that the play has kept our interest solely through its surprises, we feel that at least Kempson should show us how his characters work through their impasse.  But he doesn’t.  Unlike Sartre’s No Exit, this impasse has no greater meaning.  It’s simply an artificially constructed impasse that tells us nothing about parents or teachers as  Kempson’s “Playwrights Notes” claim it does.  The only relation to trigonometry the play has is that the three characters form a triangle of relationships and each one has an angle.

The main virtue of the the play is that Kempson writes very natural dialogue even if he has a tendency to repetitiveness.  All three cast members deliver the dialogue with equal naturalness.  Alison Deon well plays the calm, slightly lethargic Susan who finally comes to intense life in the final scene.  Rose Napoli tends to give a one-not performance as Gabriella, who seems to be in a perpetual state of anger no matter what’s she’s speaking of including the brief scene where we see her teaching.  Daniel Ellis has Jackson come across as such an easy-going, nice guy that it makes it all the more unlikely that Jackson, one of whose fathers is a lawyer, would ever think that blackmailing a teacher would succeed better than simply more hard work.

Anna Treusch has designed a clever set for the alley staging of the play where she has covered the floor and two walls of the playing area entirely in mathematical equations – from trigonometry but mixed with others from algebra and differential calculus.  Lighting designer Kaileigh Krysztofiak frequently uses triangle cutouts to reinforce the play’s central image.  Kempson’s direction is generally natural, although why he should have Gabriella and Jackson play out their big confrontation while standing on a table is a mystery.

In a scuffle at the end Kempson has Jackson accidentally knock Susan down.  Is this meant to be significant or not?  That act encapsulates the whole play where accident and coincidence create a highly artificial scenario whose significance remains unknown.  Trigonometry is the last in Kempson’s series called “The Graduation Plays”.  I have not seen the previous two plays to see how well Trigonometry completes the series.  On its own, though, it seems an unsatisfying play enlivened only by the strong commitment of its actors.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Daniel Ellis, Alison Deon and Rose Napoli, ©2017 Robert Harding; Rose Napoli and Alison Deon, ©2017 Greg Wong.

For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca/tickets/?spektrix_bounce=true.