Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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by Daniel Pagett, directed by Anne van Leeuwen
Coyote Collective, Leroy Street Theatre & Scapegoat Collective, The Assembly Theatre, 1479 Queen St. West, Toronto
February 23-March 10, 2018
Craig: “I’m tired of being astounded and confused”
For his latest play, Daniel Pagett leaves the world of sci-fi behind that he explored in Cloud last year, for an up-to-date look at gender relations. The 55-minute-long two-hander has an unusual premise and is packed with surprising twists. Unfortunately, is seems simply to stop rather than conclude with the premise apparently forgotten. Both the acting and the direction need to be more detailed to give what is a highly artificial plot a greater semblance of realism.
In Chris Bretecher’s fine set of a generically bland hotel room, we meet Craig (Blue Bigwood-Mallin), speaking aloud who is trying to convince himself that he is “not an animal”. There is a knock at the door and Craig finds Veronica (Susannah Mackay) standing there. He has been expecting to see her. She has emphatically not been expecting to see him and shuts the door in his face, or rather on his face.
As it happens, Craig has been masquerading online under another name and has catfished Veronica into meeting his alter ego in his hotel room for a little no-strings-attached sex. Veronica had been Craig’s TA when he was still a professor. They had had an affair that lasted until Craig’s wife Naomi found out about it and divorced him. In leaving Craig, Naomi had claimed that Craig was just an animal incapable of controlling his urges. Craig has lured Veronica back into his life for the express purpose of proving to himself at least that he is not an animal. (In Pagett’s timeline it takes only three months between Craig and Naomi’s breakup and there divorce – an impossibility except if the play is set in Nevada.)
Craig’s manner of proof will be to have Veronica stay the night with him and he will not even touch her. If he can’t resist his urges and has sex with her then he will give her $5000. Veronica does not like this plan because it makes her look like a prostitute. She therefore recasts Craig’s idea as a bet. If she fails to seduce him that night, then he will give her the $5000 because it will be worth having proved his virtue. If, however, she does succeed in seducing him, he will keep his money. Craig accedes to her plan.
What happens over the course of the evening as the couple empties a bottle of bourbon is one revelation after another that the two are playing mind games with each other and had been doing so even when they were in a relationship. In their past, what was key to Veronica’s wanting to sleep with a married man was her seeing how much in love he was with his wife. She wanted to see if she, for once, could experience that kind of love too. The main question in the play is how much of Craig’s love for his wife or Veronica’s for Craig has remained or whether the notion of “love” no longer applies to either relationship.
If this sounds confusing it is because it is confusing. And when we discover that things were not what they seemed from the very beginning, it becomes almost impossible to know whether the two are continually lying to each other or occasionally telling the truth. Not only is it too difficult to reconstruct what has been really happening once Pagett reverses our initial assumptions, by the end he seems to have forgotten all about the initial set-up, i.e. the point Craig was trying to prove about himself and Veronica’s bet. Pagett stops the action just when you expect that one or other of the two will link what has happened back to the beginning.
Another part of the problem is Anne van Leeuwen’s direction. The best actors can make it clear when what their character says is sincere or not by casting a shadow of ambiguity over those statements that may or may not be true. Van Leeuwen cannot get either Bigwood-Mallin or Mackay to do this. The result is that they speak their lies in exactly the same way as they tell their truths. The problem is that the audience, having no clue whether the characters are lying or not, begins not to care about anything the characters say and thus lose interest in the story A side problem is that Pagett shows the two drinking a large amount of bourbon over a short period of time, yet van Leeuwen has not encouraged either of the actors to show that they are becoming progressively more inebriated. This is important because the drunker the two are, the less easy it is for them to hide what they really think. Also, as Pagett writes it, the drunker they become, they strangely and contrary to common sense become more articulate.
The best moments in the play both as Pagett has written them and as van Leeuwen has directed them are the quieter moments when the characters have a chance to reflect on what they have said or done.
A further difficulty with the production is the imbalance between the two actors and how they play their characters. Mackay plays Veronica as clearly the savvier and more insightful of the two, but that also makes it more difficult that a young woman like her would ever waste her time with an obviously confused man of a higher rank. Pagett gives Mackay one line to suggest that Veronica’s ex was abusive, but we really need to know more about her to understand why someone who presents as so attractive and smart should think she would never experience love.
Bigwood-Mallin has the tendency to rush his lines so that they seldom sound completely natural. He also tends to drop his voice at the end of a line so that sometimes a key word will go unheard. He plays Craig so much like a dopey nerd that it hard to believe that he is prey to his “animal urges” and needs to prove he can resist them. Even a comically short coitus scene suggests that he is more inept than anything else.
Pagett’s model for his scenario of two ex-lovers playing mind-games with each other in a hotel room is likely the Sam Shepard classic Fool for Love (1983), minus the third voyeuristic character, or even Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (1944), also minus the third character. In both these plays Shepard and Sartre lend the tortured relation of male and female a meaning greater than merely a struggle between two mismatched people. Shepard uses it to explore the divisions at the heart of America. Sartre uses it to show that there is no hope of redemption for inauthentic behaviour. One thus comes away from Homewrecker confused more than enlightened and wishing that he had explored his characters and the implications of their actions to a greater extent.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Blue Bigwood-Mallin and Susannah Mackay; Blue Bigwood-Mallin and Susannah Mackay. ©2018 John Gundy.
For tickets, visit www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3324619.
2018-02-24
Homewrecker