Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✩✩✩
by Jason Sherman, directed by Richard Rose
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
November 14-December 16, 2018
McLuhan: “I don't necessarily agree with everything I say”
Having a fascinating subject does not guarantee a fascinating play. So it is with Jason Sherman’s latest effort The Message about Canada’s world-famous media guru of the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan (1911-80). One might have thought that with a genius as his subject who foresaw the internet before there were even personal computers Sherman would have a rich mine of information and ideas to explore and communicate. Yet, The Message is exceedingly dull despite the best efforts of its top-notch cast and leaves one longing for a less incoherent presentation about one of Canada’s most influential intellectuals.
The play starts off on the wrong foot with a scene played in total darkness where a character named Mary comes to visit McLuhan to tell him he failed the spread the message that the Father had given him. After falsely implying that McLuhan had some sort of Messianic complex the lights go up to reveal a McLuhan (R.H. Thompson) who has fallen down stairs because he has just had a stroke and can only make random sounds rather than speak. McLuhan’s faithful secretary Margaret (Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster) and his wife Corinne (Sarah Orenstein) hover helplessly around him.
With a lighting change McLuhan suddenly switches from a writhing, inarticulate patient to a hyper-articulate professor. Those familiar with McLuhan’s biography will know we have switched from 1979 when McLuhan had the stroke from which he would never fully recover to 1968 when McLuhan was back at the University of Toronto after having had a tumour removed from his brain in 1967. While the brain surgery saved McLuhan’s life, it is generally agreed that he was never the same afterwards. He became irritable, particularly sensitive to sound, lost his photographic memory and rehashed old ideas rather than developing new ones.
That Sherman should show us McLuhan only in his two states of decline in 1979 or in 1968 and never depict his pre-surgery self is only one of many bizarre aspects of the play. Another is that Sherman structures the play as the same day replayed six or seven times with variations. How exactly is making the play a riff on the movie Groundhog Day (1993) appropriate for Marshall McLuhan?
The basic structure of the day consists of McLuhan trying to dictate to Margaret a chapter of a (fictional) book that he regards as his magnum opus. His dictation is interrupted by phone calls from someone who always hangs up. It is also interrupted by what McLuhan thinks is someone buzzing at his door though Margaret hears nothing. There is one phone call or message from Mary, the only student whose thesis McLuhan is supervising, but he refuses to see her. Finally, McLuhan asks Margaret to read a passage he is obsessed with from near the end of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) to which he comments that it is best read with an Irish brogue. The repetitions of this day are separated by McLuhan’s surreal reveries of the past, but the repetitions of the same actions and same comments plus the failure to explain frequent allusions in the reveries very soon become tedious.
For example, all Sherman tells us, perhaps in order to be metaphorical, is that at the U. of T. McLuhan works at “The Centre” but never tells us the “Centre” of what. (At the time it was the called the Centre for Culture and Technology.) We hear that because of McLuhan’s stroke the U. of T. wants to close the Centre down and has wanted to do so for a long time. Never does Sherman explain why the U. of T. would want to close a centre for study by one of its most illustrious professors. What did it have against McLuhan? Was it because he was too popular? Was the typical Canadian tall poppies syndrome at work? Some may know that there is now a McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology that replaced the Centre, but as to what did or did not happen Sherman leaves us in the dark.
As for the frequent phone calls, who is it? What do they want? We never know. What we do know is that Sherman, annoyingly, rarely allows McLuhan to finish an thought without interrupting him in some way.
Far worse, in one of McLuhan’s fantasies Sherman has two American characters enter speaking in near-gibberish who apparently know McLuhan well enough to treat him as a buddy. We barely catch their names – Feigen (Peter Hutt) and Gossage (Patrick McManus) – but who they are and what they have to do with McLuhan Sherman never makes clear. Only if you already know McLuhan’s biography well will you realize that these two are California advertising executives who who were so taken with McLuhan’s work they decided to use their own funds to promote him and his writing both in New York and San Francisco and succeeded in making him a celebrity. The dumb catchphrase of the time, “Whatcha doin’ Marshall McLuhan” is attributed to Gossage.
Sherman allows the post-surgery McLuhan enough lucidity that McLuhan manages to explain in the most general terms the nature of his studies. All media, including clothing, are extensions of the human body. But these inventions become part of human beings’ environment and therefore begin to exert influence on them. Or as McLuhanite John Culkin summed it up so well, “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” We can only master the influence of media on us if we recognize that the influence exists. Sherman has McLuhan mention that the electronic age in which we live will be marked by a return to tribalism. This notion is so prescient and relevant to present-day discussions about the effect of social media in dividing rather than uniting society that one wishes Sherman had placed more emphasis on it.
But no, Sherman seems to be preoccupied with having us contemplate the irony of a great mind like McLuhan’s, an expert in all human means of communication, suffering the fate of being unable to communicate himself. One supposes he would find the same irony in Milton’s blindness, Beethoven’s deafness, Nietzsche’s madness or Hawking’s ALS. Yet, such a contemplation is static, not dramatic, and it leads to no great insight. Even so, Sherman presents the post-stroke McLuhan in a contradictory way. If the point is that McLuhan cannot communicate, why does Sherman show us McLuhan writing out a joke on a piece of paper? Why does he also show us McLuhan using a Speak & Spell toy? Did McLuhan deliberately shun these means of communicating and if so, why? Again, Sherman never tells us even though it is crucial to our understanding of McLuhan’s predicament to find out.
What Sherman’s play does provide is a great central role for the actor playing McLuhan. R.H. Thomson brilliantly meets the technical challenge of switching seamlessly between the lucid McLuhan and his two quite different stages of impairment. He is excellent at showing how the lucid phases of the post-surgery McLuhan begin to crumble before our eyes into distraction and incoherence. Besides this, Thomson has mastered the enormous difficulties of keeping all the varied repetitions of the same day absolutely clear.
Yet, for all the daunting technical demands built into the role, Sherman can’t be said to have created a fully rounded character. McLuhan was a man of many contradictions – a seer into the future of media yet a devout Catholic who read the Bible every day, a master of abstract thinking who enjoyed terrible jokes and punning. The nearest Sherman comes is in depicting McLuhan as a man of hyperactive intelligence, something Thomson well captures, but that doesn’t explain McLuhan’s unwavering love for his caring but non-hyper-intellectual wife Corinne nor his religious devotion.
The other four actors in the cast each play at least two main roles, unfortunately none of these are well rounded characters either. Principal among these is Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster who gives a warm performance as McLuhan’s loyal, self-effacing, protective secretary Margaret. Lancaster also succeeds in the wittiest role in the play, that of Marilyn, a semi-nude cigarette girl in a San Francisco nightclub, who understands McLuhan’s ideas better than his two businessman promoters.
Peter Hutt’s Gerald Feigen is the loud, nearly obnoxious friend you put up with simply because his loyalty to you seems to outweigh the embarrassment he causes. Hutt’s other role is the NBC vice president Paul Klein, who mostly seems like a toned-down version of Feigen. Sherman has so underwritten the role of Howard Gossage he gives Patrick McManus nothing to work with except to be a happy hanger-on with Feigen, even though the two are really equal partners. Luckily, Sherman does give McManus something more substantial in the role of Father Frank, a Catholic priest who comes to visit the post-stroke McLuhan, and who has the most serious, uninterrupted talk with the professor of anyone in the play.
For a show about the man who wrote Understanding Media (1964), the play has a distinctly underwhelming production. Director Richard Rose uses projections so seldom and so pointlessly, one wonders why he uses them at all. Rose’s most interesting idea is to place McLuhan on a wheeled armchair in the middle of a small revolve of Camellia Koo’s dreary set so that when the revolve turns McLuhan can remain facing us in from the centre. The revolve could also be used to effect changes of perspective on the action, but Rose never takes up that idea
Leaving the show all you will remember of McLuhan’s ideas is “The Medium is the message”, which is likely the one the phrase of his you entered with. Seeing McLuhan in two different states of incapacitation does nothing to enlighten us about the man or his ideas and neither do the array of cardboard figures that Sherman places around him. The best thing that The Message will do is pique interest again in McLuhan and perhaps make people seek out the 1999 CBC documentary Out of Orbit: The Life and Times of Marshall McLuhan or read Philip Marchand’s 1989 biography Marshal McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, or, even better, read or re-read Understanding Media.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Courtney Ch'ng Lancaster as Margaret and R.H. Thomson as Marshal McLuhan; Patrick McManus as Howard Gossage, R.H. Thomson and Peter Hutt as Gerald Feigen; R.H. Thomson and Sarah Orenstein as Corinne McLuhan. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com
2018-11-15
The Message