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by Erin Shields, directed by Peter Hinton

Tarragon Theatre, Toronto

March 8-April 9, 2017

Moxy: “Happiness is a cheat”

Erin Shields’s new play The Millennial Malcontent is a major disappointment.  It impossible to understand how someone who wrote such a fine work as If We Were Birds (2010), could have had anything to do with so ill-conceived a play as Malcontent.  Shields’s play has three conflicting goals.  First, it is an adaptation of John Vanbrugh’s 1697 comedy The Provoked Wife one of the first plays in English to depict sympathetically a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage.  Second, it tries to change the already proto-feminist play into a feminist play only to achieve the opposite effect.  Third, it tries to be a satire of millennials, an already much satirized generation about whom Shields has nothing new to say.  The result is a play where the nature of neither the plot nor the characters is clear.

As usual a person who proposes to adapt a play that has survived 300 years as a classic should do so with caution.  What exactly has allowed the play to stand the test of time and can this be altered without ruining the play?  In The Provoked Wife, which shocked its contemporary audiences, it is the very modernity of its subject matter.  Vanbrugh’s depiction of a marriage that has gone sour for both partners comes almost two centuries before such portrayals became common in Ibsen and Strindberg.  The good Lady Brute is subject to the constant abuse of her husband Sir John Brute to the point that she is provoked into considering an affair with a man, Constant, who she knows is in love with her.  Meanwhile, as a subplot, Constant’s woman-hating friend Heartfree falls in love with Lady Brute’s niece Belinda.  Both misogynists in the play are punished – Heartfree by falling in love and Sir John Brute by being caught by the police disguised in his wife’s clothing.

Instead of giving the provoked husband Johnny a nephew, Shields gives him a dependent best friend Heartfree (James Daly), not a woman-hater, who curates an alternative music podcast.  The man-hater in the play is the graduate student Teasel (Natasha Mumba).  Her friend Faith (Rong Fu) is the Constant of the play.  Faith is in love with Johnny and tempts him to unfaithfulness while Teasel, in spite of herself falls in love with Heartfree. 

In The Provoked Wife, Vanbrugh’s satire on women is confined to the outrageous Lady Fancyfull, whose charms are all external rather than internal like those of Lady Brute and Belinda.  She, too, is after Heartfree and proceeds in her attack with the help of her companion Mademoiselle.  In Malcontent, Shields changes Lady Fancyfull into the male vlogging star Charm (Frank Cox-O’Connell) and Mademoiselle into his Québécoise cousin Mimi (Amelia Sargisson).  What Shields forgets to do is to give them any reason for being in the play.  Charm supposedly wants to expose Johnny’s unfaithfulness to Moxy, but to what end is unclear. 

Changing the characters’ genders does not make the play more feminist.  It does make the play’s most ridiculous character, lady Fanciful, a man and it does allow Mademoiselle to have a lesbian fling with Raz (Alicia Richardson), a female version of Vanbrugh’s character Razor.  But this change also makes the least likeable character in Vanbrugh’s play, Sir John Brute, a woman, who is just as selfish, rude and unlikeable.  Not only this, but Shields has Moxy come to see the value of marriage in a long speech in praise of the institution at the end.  Similarly, the proudly single Teasel eventually falls for a man.  The outcome is thus less transgressive than the original play.

Worse, Shields’s adaptation hardly reflects the actual lives of millennials.  She has them mention blogging, vlogging and podcasting and infects their speech with current academic jargon.  But Shields seems unable to fit social media into the action.  She hasn’t moved enough away from her source to rethink how millennials communicate.  They certainly do not speak in complex, multi-clause sentences as she has them do.  Such sentences might be common in Vanbrugh but hardly ever appear in the the age of tweets and emoticons.

Given all these flaws, it’s up to the actors to make the play work as best they can.  Only three of them, James Daly as Heartfree, Alicia Richardson as Raz and Natasha Mumba as Teasel are able to make their characters seem like real, believable people rather than puppets the author is manipulating for the plot or simply for sake of extraneous jokes.  Mumba is especially good at making sense of the tongue-twisting academic jargon Shields gives Teasel.

Liz Peterson plays Moxy as so cynical and brutish that it is difficult to find any humour in her intentionally outlandish statements and actions.  Shields gives Peterson the impossible task of making a 180º turnabout on her beliefs about marriage simply when confronted with the fact that Johnny could really cheat on her.  That Peterson pulls this off as well as she does is a testament to her skill, but the whole situation feels extraordinarily artificial.

It took  a long time to realize that Frank Cox-O’Connell, who previously has given such subtle performances on stage, was playing the vlogger Charm.  As per Peter Hinton’s direction, Cox-O’Connell’s characterization is so far over the top he seems more like Liberace on speed than any kind of millennial.  Besides the fact that we are never clear why Charm is in the play at all, Shields makes him so self-involved and talentless that it’s impossible to know what he has to vlog about or how he could have any followers.

As a sign of the play’s lack of wit, the biggest laugh of the evening is nothing in Shields’s dialogue but rather a GIF projected by Howard Davis of a tear dripping down from Charm’s eye and then rolling back up into it.  The second biggest laugh is when Moxy, Raz and Mimi all imitate what men look like when they masturbate.  It may be funny but it feels like an unrelated improv comedy skit dropped into the middle of the action.  The play also includes a masquerade sequence so ill-explained that it seems to exist in the vain hope that the funny costume will provoke laughter. 

In the end, The Millennial Malcontent is successful neither as an adaptation of The Provoked Wife nor as a satire of millennials.  Though it is not a comedy, the best Canadian play about millennials is still Jordan Tannahill’s Concord Floral (2014) that focusses on the angst and isolation of a generation that feels it has no identity and no future.  For a disturbing view of millennials’ obsession with social media, see Five Faces for Evelyn Frost playing in Toronto until March 25.  As for Vanbrugh, Stratford staged the writer’s great play The Relapse (1698) back in 1989 but has never staged The Provoked Wife.  If Shields’s play has any positive effect it is to make one long to see a professional production of Vanbrugh’s original as soon as possible.      

©Christopher Hoile

*See www.gallup.com/poll/191462/gallup-analysis-millennials-marriage-family.aspx.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Rong Fu, Natasha Mumba, Frank Cox-O'Connell, Reza Sholeh, James Daly, Amelia Sargisson, Alicia Richardson and Liz Peterson; Liz Peterson as Moxy; Frank Cox-O’Connell as Charm; Reza Sholeh as Johnny and James Daly as Heartfree. ©2017 Cylla von Tiedemann).

For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.