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by Rosamund Small, directed by Peter Pasyk

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

August 29-September 16, 2018

“Oh, thou child of many prayers!

Life hath quicksands, – Life hath snares

Care and age come unawares!”

(from “Maidenhood” by Longfellow)

Rosamund Small’s latest play Sisters, now receiving its world premiere at Soulpepper, is unsatisfying both in its storytelling and its unstable mood.  The play is a stage adaptation of the novella Bunner Sisters by American author Edith Wharton (1862-1937), written in 1891 but not published until 1916.  Most audience members will have no knowledge of the play’s source, but those who have read Wharton’s more famous works like The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911) or The Age of Innocence (1920), will realize that Small not only does not capture Wharton’s characteristic atmosphere of impending doom, but actually tries to counteract it.  She does so at her peril because in trying to make the story something it’s not it loses its coherence. 

Small’s adaptation tells of the two Bunner sisters, Ann (Laura Condlln) the elder and Evelina (Nicole Power) the younger, who run a small notions and alterations shop in a less than savoury part of New York City.  Orphaned at a young age the small shop is all they have and all they know.  The sisters general fear of the outside world and ignorance of desire is altered when Ann buys a clock for Eveline for her birthday from a local clockmaker Herman  Ramy (Kevin Bundy).  For the first time in her life Ann feels an attraction to a man and is disconcerted yet elated by the feeling.  Soon Ramy drops by to check up on the clock and meets Evelina.  She is also immediately drawn to him as Ann notices unhappily. 

Ramy’s subsequent visits and Evelina’s increasingly lively response to them only convince Ann that Ramy is interested in Evelina not in her.  Ann is, therefore, completely taken aback when out of the blue Ramy proposes marriage and says that she, Ann, is the one he has always loved.  Convinced that she is too old to marry, determined not to interfere with her sister’s happiness and given by nature to self-sacrifice, Ann refuses Ramy and urges him to propose to Evelina instead.  This, in time, Ramy does and the lives of all three are ruined. 

Wharton’s novella is written in the mode of Naturalism, a literary movement influenced by Darwinism, that depicted human beings as products of their heredity and environment.  The first question Wharton’s story poses is whether the outcome of the action could have have been happy if Ann had accepted Ramy’s proposal and whether her refusal drove Ramy into a disastrous marriage with her sister.  The second question is whether there could have been a happy ending of any kind once the inadvertent love triangle had formed. 

Unfortunately, Small’s adaptation, unlike Wharton’s novella, is not interested in the question of free will versus determinism.  Small has decided to turn Wharton’s story into the tale a woman’s transition from dependence to independence.  Small thus has to wrench Wharton’s narrative about in the second half of the play to force a happy ending onto a story that had previous had an unavoidably negative trajectory.          

Small has to add scenes to the play that don’t exist in the novella, and two of the most ridiculous are among these.  In one, Ann asks to convert to Catholicism as her sister has done to marry Ramy, but she knows so little that she thinks a nun is a priest’s wife.  The Bunner sisters live sheltered lives but it is hard to think Ann could live in New York and be so impossibly ignorant.  In another, after Evelina has married, and left Ann alone, a rich woman (Ellora Patnaik) offers Ann a high-paying job at a department store.  Giving a series of excuses, none of which make any sense, Ann absurdly refuses the offer.  Small adds the scene to set up her ending which goes contrary to Wharton’s intent.  Wharton’s point at the end is that Ann has become too old to be employable.  As a feminist Wharton is condemning the

ageist bias in society, especially in commerce and still prevalent, that only attractive young women can sell products.  Small, clearly does not understand Wharton’s feminist intent and tries to turn Ann into a modern woman at the very end which runs counter to everything we’ve seen previously in the play. 

Just as Small contradicts Wharton’s and her own portrayal of Ann’s character, she also ignores the symbolism built into the story.  Why, after all, is Ramy a clockmaker?  Why is the central symbol of the play a clock?  Why does Wharton have Ramy recite Longfellow’s poem “Maidenhood” with its pronounced carpe diem theme about a woman seizing the moment before she is too old?  (Small has Ramy recite a different poem.)  Wharton depicts Ann as a woman in a battle against time which is only made worse by society’s prejudice against older women.  Ramy offers Ann a rare chance at freedom from that prejudice, one that she herself has internalized.  The terrible irony in Wharton is that marriage to Ramy is no guarantee of freedom.

Small’s adaptation is flawed in ways other than in its unconvincing attempt to put a positive spin on a downbeat story.  In the first half of the play’s 90 minutes, each actor plays only one role.  Suddenly, in the second half, Small requires a larger cast and four of the six actors (Bundy, Raquel Duffy, Patnaik and Karen Robinson) have to do double and triple duty.  This makes the play feel ill-conceived.  Instead, it should be established from the start that the four play multiple roles by making them customers or passers-by.

Laura Condlln’s Ann is the centre of the play and Condlln does heroic duty in making this conflicted character convincing.  She is excellent at conveying Ann’s suppressed desire for Ramy and her momentary suppressed jealousy when Evelina meets him.  When Ramy proposes to Ann, Condlln displays layers of different emotions intersecting with each other to make Ann’s reply nearly incoherent, as if Ann were almost unsuccessfully trying to convince herself why she should reject a moment she had dreamt of.  Yet, even Condlln cannot make Small’s two poorly written scenes of conversion and rejection of a good job ring true and Condlln’s feisty Ann of Small’s new ending does not resemble anything we’ve seen in the character before.

Evelina is meant to be less self-aware than Ann and that is how Soulpepper Academy member Nicole Power plays it.  Power makes Evelina visibly more excitable and expressive than Condlln’s Ann.  Yet it would help if Power attuned herself more to Condlln’s manner of gesture and diction the better to indicate that Evelina and Ann are sisters and that Ann has been Evelina’s prime model for behaviour.

Kevin Bundy portrays Herman Ramy as a shy, kindly, formal, slightly fussy older man whose approachability would easily attract two sheltered women like the Bunner sisters.  What is missing both because of Small’s writing and because of Peter Pasyk’s direction is any hint that Bundy’s character has darker side.  Pasyk could have brought this out by having Bundy speak of Ramy’s past and of his “illness” in a more suspicious, evasive manner.  For her part Small, deliberately alters the scene in Wharton’s story that tells the reader, though not Ann, exactly what Ramy’s secret is.  In the novella, Ann goes to visit Ramy because she is worried he is sick.  Indeed, he is suffering from his “illness” and from Ann’s description of his symptoms any reader of Wharton’s time would know what his “illness” is.  Small, however, rather than making he scene about Ann’s glimpse of

Ramy when ill, focusses on Ramy’s having broken a glass of water (not in the novella) and cleaning it up.  That Small should gloss over such a crucial scene that Ann in the novella later recalls as a sign she did not understand at the time is a major flaw.

Karen Robinson plays Mrs. Mellins, a dressmaker older than Ann, who lives above the sisters and bangs on the floor whenever she has a headache.  Wharton has a paragraph describing Mrs. Mellins’ odd personality and love for exaggerating lurid crimes.  Small decides to flesh out the character and have her appear frequently throughout the action bringing with her more of her comically grotesque stories, most of which Small has made up.  Robinson is so good at playing this richly comic character that the figure draws attention away from whatever scene she is in.  Indeed, in the first half of the play, Small draws so much comedy from Mrs. Mellins’ stories and the Bunner sisters’ naïveté that one could well imagine that the story was meant to be a comedy when, if fact, it is not.  Even in the second half of the play, the mood uncomfortably jerks into comedy when it is at its most depressing.

Ellora Patnaik is quite convincing as the wealthy Puffed Sleeves Lady, who comes to understand Ann better than Ann does herself.  Raquel Duffy keeps her large number of roles distinct, particularly the forbidding Mrs. Hochmuller, who runs a café Ramy patronizes and later a Nun, who is patient enough to answer Ann’s ignorant questions with sympathy.

One curiosity of Sisters is that set designer Michelle Tracey and lighting designer Kimberly Purtell seem to have understood the play better than the playwright.  Tracey has placed the Bunner sisters’ single room inside the outlines of a cube to indicate how isolated the sisters are and how regimented their lives are.  Black panels slide open behind the cube and are the only hint that there is anything mysterious about Ramy.  Meanwhile, Purtell has devised the wonderful effect of having a ray of light pan over the floor of the sisters’ room as if it were the hand of a clock.  Together, Tracey’s cube and Purtell’s light give the impression that the sisters are living inside a clock, the play’s central symbol that Small’s text seems to neglect.

After previous successful plays like the comedy Genesis and Other Stories (2013) or the site-specific drama Vitals (2014), the ineptitude of Small’s storytelling comes as a surprise.  Wharton’s Bunner Sisters could be an intriguing play but its mood, symbolism and action are so tied together that the plot cannot be forced into an upbeat direction without ruining the entire structure.  Let’s hope Small returns to form in her next work.                 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Kevin Bundy as Ramy, Laura Condlln as Ann and Nicole Power as Evelina; Laura Condlln as Ann and Kevin Bundy as Herman Ramy; Karen Robinson as Mrs. Mellins, Laura Condlln as Ann and Nicole Power as Evelina. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit https://www.soulpepper.ca