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by Linda McLean, directed by Paul Lampert

Theatre PANIK, Artscape Sandbox, 301 Adelaide Street West, Toronto

May 12-28, 2017

Denis: “Seeing everything is paralysing”

When you encounter a play with a title like “strangers, babies”, you already know it will be disturbing.  Strangers should have nothing to do with babies and vice versa.  Or is the title an appositive?  Are the “babies” also “strangers”?  Those unsettling topics are exactly what Scottish playwright Linda McLean’s enigmatic work is about.  Theatre PANIK has brought McLean’s play from 2007 to life in an extraordinarily inventive way that brilliantly adds a layer of fatalism to an already perturbing work.

McLean’s play has a rigorously formal structure.  Its 85 minutes are divided into five discreet scenes of about the same length set in five different places at five different times.  Each scene is a duologue between the only female character May and a man, a different man in each scene.  The period of time covered is a little over two years.  This very tidy structure contrasts completely with May’s very confused psychology.  The play is like a mystery since every new scene gives us further clues to the terrible event that took place some time in May’s childhood that she has been trying to escape ever since. 

In that the play is also like a journey in which May strives for normality despite the past event that has marked her as abnormal.  Realizing this, director Paul Lampert has had the ingenious idea of presenting McLean’s play in promenade style.  All the scenes are set in distinct places designed with an look of arid modernism by Michael Gianfrancesco inside the Artscape Sandbox space.  We move with May (Niki Landau) as she goes from place to place, encounter to encounter, and thus physically feel we are accompanying her on her journey. 

The mere fact that all five locations can be seen at once and that the men of each location enact similar arm movements choreographed by Kate Alton when we move from place to place, suggest that the stations of May’s journey, and their outcomes, have already been determined and the conclusion inescapable.  While May as a character still believes she has the ability to choose and change as she moves from place to place, Lampert’s mise en scène already tells us that May is doomed to followed a certain path.  The sense of fatalism that this engenders makes the tension mount in us as we come closer to May’s final destination.  Meanwhile Christopher Stanton’s extremely realistic soundscape of children playing never lets us forget that something in May’s past has determined her future.

This final destination in Gianfrancesco’s design is the only fully enclosed space of the five locations.  It looks like the centre of a maze and this notion is confirmed in the previous scene where May’s brother, in a conversation about gardens, refers to the meandering nature of May’s mind as a “synaptic ... mazeland”.  Our physical journey with May is thus also a journey through the maze of her thoughts until we come to the awful realization that lies at the centre.

The first scene is between May (Niki Landau) and her husband Dan about a small bird that has dashed itself against the window of their condo and lies broken on the balcony outside.  While May wants to help the bird somehow, Dan insists that it will be useless.  He is annoyed at how May anthropomorphizes birds and that she doesn’t realize that what has happened is her own doing.  They live across from a park and she has put a bird feeder in their balcony thus ensuring that birds will approach and may misjudge the distance because of the windows.  Her solution is not to remove the bird feeder, as Dan wants, but to buy a plastic owl to scare away the birds.  The illogic of this plan is what gives us the first hint that May may be slightly unhinged.  Richard Ausar Stewart gives a fine understated performance as Dan, suggesting that the loving husband has grown weary with his wife’s eccentricities.  When Dan calms May with the fantasy of owning a house with a garden, Stewart makes us feel that the husband has started treating his wife almost as if she were a mental patient.

The caregiver-patient relationship is reversed in the second scene when May visits her father Duncan, dying of cancer, in his room in a hospice.  Our task in this scene is to determine how much of Duncan cynicism towards May’s goodwill is due to his physical pain and how much is due to an inherent disgust with his daughter.  David Schurmann, familiar from his many appearances as the Shaw Festival, has the chance to play quite a different character than he has played there before.  Schurmann’s Duncan is mean and verbally aggressive toward May to such an extent we wonder why May bothers to visit him.  Though nothing explicit is said, Schurmann hints at an animosity towards May that began shortly after her infancy.  Only after an extra dose of morphine does he soften towards her, but by then she has left.

Since watching strangers, babies is a process where each scene helps us piece together May’s past and present, a full summary of the action is impossible without ruining the surprises that arise in each scene.  About the third scene set in a hotel, I will say only that it provides key information about the state of May’s mind.  Richard Lee plays Roy, a man that May has met on the internet, and the reason they have both met is quite startling until we can place in in the context of the whole play.  The scene is also the only outright comic section of the entire play.  Lee is excellent as showing Roy’s combination of kindness and awkwardness and captures perfectly the fumbling excitement and fear of disappointment of someone new to the idea of meeting in person someone who has only known him from his internet persona. 

The fourth scene set in a park is the most volatile and revealing of the five.  There May has set up a meeting with her estranged brother Denis.  He is not at all happy to see her, to meet her in a park or to hear the news she wants to tell him.  In fact, he is outraged that she would violate a promise that they both made to each other after the mysterious incident in the past.  He has stood by his vow and is clearly still haunted by the incident.  May, however, believes that she has been able to put that behind her, a point of view that Denis mercilessly ridicules.  His view of looking back on his life is that “Seeing everything is paralysing”.  Indeed, if May were fully aware of the scene that will follow, she might understand better what Denis means.  Unfortunately, May deliberately does not want to think ahead or look behind and so finds herself entrapped by both her past and her present.  Jeff Lillico plays Denis with a fierceness that his appearances with Soulpepper have so far not allowed him to display.  Lillico disturbingly shows Denis as a young man burning up with self-hatred and inimical to any suggestion that things can improve or be overcome.

The fifth and final scene is set inside the enclosed room at the centre of the large performing space.  We, as audience, have to peer into the room through cut-out windows or watch the action via live video projected on the wall outside.  Here May meets Abel, a name likely chosen both for its homophonic and it biblical reference, who is a social worker assigned to May, who now has a two-year-old child.  The fear that May feels seems out of proportion to the ordinary questions of the social worker.  If we have pieced May’s story together correctly we will have figured out why a social worker has been assigned to make spot checks on May and her son Sam.  The more May resists Abel, the more tension mounts as to what May may be trying to conceal from him.  Gradually, we come to see that the play is about a double tragedy.  By the end we have worked out what must have been the horrific incident in May’s past, but we have also seen from the evidence of the previous four scenes that, contrary to what May would like to believe, there is no way ever to escape that past.  Edmund Stapleton gives a subtle performance as Abel both trying to act as if what he is doing is routine while also showing us how his suspicion of May keeps growing.

Niki Landau’s portrait of May is disturbing from the outset.  The way she gives May an almost infantile view of the hurt bird in the first scene makes us uncomfortable.  Landau seems to give May a strength we hadn’t suspected when she sees her father, but the way she tries to blank out the negative words he has for her helps breed suspicion.  Landau shows us a comic side to May in the hotel room where the ineptitude she gives May as a neophyte to this kind of encounter perfectly matches Lee’s.  Even more disconcerting than her disconnect with her father is the disconnect Landau reveals between May and her brother who seem to be living in entirely different ethical spheres.  The fear Landau shows in relation to Abel summarizes her masterful technique throughout the play of portraying the agitated façade of May, desperately trying to appear normal, while unaware that the very energy of maintaining that façade reveals a turmoil of emotion behind it. 

Linda McLean’s strangers, babies is a highly elusive play where characters seem incapable of discussing anything directly and where we must work harder than in most British plays to divine what the subtext is from the emotions and seeming inconsequential words that the characters speak.  Some may feel that McLean’s play is too elusive.  But other may find that the inability of the characters to speak of an event that preys on all their minds only makes that event more terrifying since is literally “unspeakable”. 

Most audience members will be caught up in May’s question of absolution even as they come to realize as does May that absolution may never be possible.  strangers, babies is an engrossing experience made only more involving by Paul Lampert’s brilliant presentation of the work.  In fact, having seen the play in this production, I would now find any more conventional staging insufficient.  Do allow yourself to wander through May’s “synaptic ... mazeland” and to confront and debate the many questions it poses.     

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (top) Jeff Lillico and Niki Landau; Niki Landau and David Schurmann; Niki Landau and Richard Lee. ©2017 Neil Silcox.

For tickets, visit www.theatrepanik.ca.