Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✭✭✩
by Norm Foster, directed by Derek Ritschel
Drayton Entertainment, Hamilton Family Theatre, Cambridge
August 9-26, 2018
Rosie: “Working here has made me see that every minute is precious”
I was lucky to catch Norm Foster’s Jonas and Barry in the Home a week before it finishes its tour round the theatres run by Drayton Entertainment. Not only is the play one of Foster’s funniest but the production stars Foster himself with David Nairn in the roles they created when the play premiered at Theatre Orangeville in 2015. You could thus hardly have a more authentic production. If you think Foster is a master of writing comedy, you will see that that he is also a master of acting comedy.
The action is set on the sunny terrace of Gateway Gardens, a ritzy assisted living home. Barry Butterfield (Nairn), a newly retired dentist, is only 66, but has been moved there by his daughter Rosemary (Erin MacKinnon), called “Rosie”, because she is afraid of her father’s inherited heart condition that has already claimed several members of the family. Rosie was afraid of his dying alone and Barry is alone because his wife divorced him after she caught him having an affair. Rosie managed to get Barry into Gateway Gardens because she works there as the coordinator of “social enrichment” and resident activities.
Barry has not been taking advantage of any of the enrichment or activities his daughter is in charge of and instead spends all day lounging in an old track suit looking at the view and meditating on how he managed to ruin his life. He thinks the solution to his melancholy would be if Rosie and her husband Kevin had a baby. Then he would feel in some atavistic way his bloodline was being carried on.
Into Barry’s gloomy life steps the dapper Jonas Ainsworth (Foster), a former actor now 72, who wrote a hit song 37 years ago that has been covered by so many artists that he has not had to work since. He views Gateway Gardens as a land of opportunity and has already begun a list of possible female conquests he plans to pursue. He chides Barry for his defeatist attitude and decides to take Barry on as personal project, to buff him up so that he, too, begins to live life to the fullest.
Jonas’s plans of female conquest and of remaking Barry in his own image along with Barry’s scepticism and recalcitrance are the main sources of humour in the play. Along with this is tendency of all three characters to stray into embarrassingly personal topics from which they awkwardly try to extricate themselves. All this is conducted in dialogue that is snappier than usual for Foster but suits a situation where one of the characters is an actor with a quick wit.
Yet, amid the abundant laughter of Act 1, Foster has sown seeds of doubt that everything is as flamboyantly positive as Jonas makes it out to be. Joans claims that people are like artichokes and their leaves have to be taken off one by one until you see the real person. Jonas claims Barry has a secret self, but, in fact, it is Jonas whom we know least about. The more we learn, the more serious the play becomes and the complex its humour.
If you happen to have seen Foster on stage before, as the novelist David in the play On a First Name Basis (2012), you will be surprised at how suave and jaunty his Jonas is compared to the morose and curmudgeonly David. What remains the same, though, his his absolutely perfect comic timing. Here he augments this with an exceedingly wry tone of voice and trenchant delivery. Act 1 is so funny that there are aspects of Jonas’s behaviour we tend to ignore as quirks. In Act 2 we see that these “quirks” have much more significance than we thought. Foster is such a fine actor that simply through his body language and facial expression he makes Jonas appear to age visibly during the course of Act 2.
David Nairn is also a fine comic actor who tends to be a bit broader in acting than either of his cast mates. His specialty is his extended facial reactions to anything bizarre or off-putting that a character has said during which Nairn contorts his face into increasingly odd positions. Yet, Nairn can also deliver straightforward non-comic speeches brimming with emotion such as in the beautifully written speech Barry has in Act 2 about boating during a storm with his father. Just as Jonas appears to age in Act 2, so Barry appear to grow younger and more sprightly, a feat Nairn accomplishes with aplomb.
Erin MacKinnon makes her character Rosie sympathetic from the start. She finds the humour in a young woman who tries to balance treating her father both from the point of view as an objective professional and as a daughter who has had an up-and-down history with her father. MacKinnon shows that Rosie, too, has a secret that underlies Rosie’s behaviour until it can no longer be concealed.
While the play is often riotously funny, Foster always keeps us aware of the implications of its setting. Jonas accuses Barry of giving in and merely sitting around waiting for death. Yet, Jonas also notes stoically that we are all dying and begin dying as soon as we are born. Most people don’t associate Foster with philosophy but it is impossible for an insightful playwright given the setting he has chosen not to explore the question of how to live. The egocentric imperative to “live life to the fullest” seems to be Jonas’s dominant viewpoint in Act 1, in Act 2 this changes to the more socially aware view that “we should all help each other out”. The play, in fact, almost becomes a parable demonstrating the truth of this second view in that it shows that giving help benefits both the giver and the one being helped, or, like mercy in Portia’s famous speech, “It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes”.
Rosie says she likes working in the home because, “Working here has made me see that every minute is precious”. Foster has so constructed his play that an audience can enjoy it simply as a laugh-filled comedy. Others will see that all three characters come to learn to laugh in the face of loss and death, a fact that lends this superficially light comedy surprising depth. This all the more reason to rush to see the Canadian master of comedy play the role he originated.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Norm Foster as Jonas and David Nairn as Barry; Norm Foster as Jonas, Erin MacKinnon as Rosie and David Nairn as Barry. ©2018 Hilary Gauld Camilleri .
For tickets, visit www.draytonentertainment.com
2018-08-18
Jonas and Barry in the Home