Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✭✭✩
by Erin Courtney, directed by Jay Turvey
Theatre Animal, The Commons, 587A College St, Toronto
November 30-December 9, 2018
Alice: “Each one helps all”
Watching Alice the Magnet, you might easily think that this is the best Shaw Festival show of 2018. The difference is that Alice the Magnet is not produced by the Shaw Festival but by Theatre Animal, a group of performers and creatives who do or have worked at the Shaw Festival and stage plays on their own during the off season. Alice the Magnet, a play from 2006 by American playwright Erin Courtney now receiving its Canadian premiere, is a perfect example of the kind of work former Shaw Festival Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell used to call neo-Shavian. It is a dark, satiric parable about the self-help industry in America and how ideas formulated with the best intentions can easily flip into their exact opposite. With its excellent cast, its elegant design and direction, Alice the Magnet may be a play you have never heard of but it is one you will be very glad you got to know.
The show begins with Alice (Catherine McGregor), a renowned self-help guru, taking the audience through one of her ACT sessions where we Acknowledge what we see around us, Confess our fears and what we would like to be and then finally come to see the Truth that we can overcome these fears to be what we desire.
Immediately following this scene is one with someone who seems the the polar opposite of the ultra-calm, supportive Alice. We glimpse Louise (Julia Course), looking like a wreck, trying to teach the art of collage to a group of unruly students. Fired up with anger at one of most aggravating students Arthur, Louise has a total meltdown in front of the class.
The next time we see he, she introduces herself as the new temp to John (Jeff Irving), who runs the business side of Alice’s self-help empire. Jeff is afflicted not only with obsessive compulsive disorder but also narcolepsy with cataplexy (i.e., he can fall asleep without warning and collapse). Yet, he looks down on Louise and clearly thinks her unworthy to work for Alice, only to have Alice do an ACT session with Louise and decide she should be a permanent employee.
Things become even more bizarre when Arthur, Louise’s former student, turns up at the office after having stalked Louise’s every move to find out where she works after her meltdown. Alice has had a session with him too and has chosen him to be her new intern. Thus, three people with rather problematic relationships with each other are all forced to work together.
Even John has a problematic relationship with Alice. Even though Alice “saved” him as she did Louise and Arthur, and even though Alice and he co-founded her company, he is deeply distressed about the direction that Alice wants to go. She wants to give up her self-help seminars, the company’s main source of revenue, and focus on creating something she calls “Each Utopia”, a revolutionary new society where each person contributes to the good of all. Founding this Utopia not only will drain the company of its revenues but is bound to fail, given the fate of all previous utopian communities in world history.
When Alice decides to devote herself to Each Utopia and allow Louise to take over her self-help seminars, a major change occurs that has surprising repercussions for all four characters. What this is I can’t reveal. I will simply say that the play heads in a completely different direction than you might have predicted except that, in retrospect, we can see Courtney has well set this direction up as a possibility.
What one particularly notices about Alice the Magnet, besides the the wicked humour of its satire, is the gift that it is to actors. All four undergo 180º changes in behaviour in the course of only 100 minutes. Specifically, all four are given the chance to play characters who are quite different from anything they have previously played at the Shaw Festival.
Most notable of these is Catherine McGregor, who has typically played morally upright but generally passive women. Here, she is absolutely hypnotic as Alice. McGregor has Alice speak with such quiet but steely authority, move with such purpose and grace and look at others as if she sees directly into their hearts that she does seem possessed by some otherworldly power. The change she makes from this point is utterly convincing and McGregor seems to age by almost twenty years right before our eyes.
The closest Julia Course has come to playing anyone like Louise is when she played the inept feral girl who was the “Pig” in Michael Mackenzie’s The Baroness and the Pig at the Shaw this year. Here, Course hilariously shows us a teacher whose total burnout is just about complete. The way Course plays Louise’s inability to conceal her own boredom from her class and the way she escalates Louise’s loss of self-control is masterfully done, absolutely hilarious as well as frightening. Course gives Louise a slovenliness of word and deed that generates even more humour in contrast to John’s ultra-meticulousness. Yet, Course does suggest there is some fire in Louise despite her outward ineptitude. When this fire starts to intensify, we see that Louise is no longer to be laughed at but feared.
As John, Jeff Irving plays a kind of role leagues away from the usual types of romantic leads he has played before. In his rigid posture, speech through clenched teeth and robotic demeanour Irving presents John as a man whose OCD has rendered him comically (or is it tragically) barely human. He compulsively straightens his desk, has hand sanitizer ready to use after any skin-to-skin contact and brushes off his clothes after any contact with others or the floor. John is a living embodiment of the irony that Courtney is dissecting since John’s narcolepsy causes the control-freak to lose control and his cataplexy causes the neat-freak to fall helpless on the floor. Irving conveys through the subtlest means how both Louise and Arthur are annoyances that are silently driving him to a breaking point.
Cameron Grant had the misfortune to be miscast in both of the plays he appeared in at this year’s Shaw Festival. Alice the Magnet shows off his strengths. He is very convincing as a troubled 16-year-old. He shows that Arthur’s adoration for Alice, the only person ever to treat him well, may be good for him but is still naive. Yet, Grant makes Arthur’s major transformation at the end completely convincing.
Designer Christine Urquhart’s set consists of a minimum of furniture and a series of movable translucent screens that lighting designer Mikael Kangas illuminates to great effect. Not only does director Jay Turvey draw intensely committed performances from the whole cast but he has choreographed the many scene changes so elegantly that they are a pleasure in themselves.
Though it premiered in 2006, Erin Courtney’s play is so amazingly prescient it seems to have predicted what would happen in the world’s political climate ten years later. How does a philosophy of self-help differ from me-firstism? How do a people’s desire for unity and acceptance change so easily into divisiveness and hatred? How can people accept demagoguery after a regime of selfless leadership? When Alice the Magnet begins, you have know idea how serious and pertinent its subject matter will be. But the end the play, especially when so well performed as here, will knock you sideways.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Catherine McGregor as Alice and Julia Course as Louise; Jeff Irving as John, Julia Course as Louise and Cameron Grant as Arthur. ©2018 Marcus Tuttle.
For tickets, visit https://theatreanimalco.com.
2018-12-01
Alice the Magnet