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by Rona Munro, directed by Jackie Maxwell

Canadian Stage, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

October 22-November 3, 2024

Lucy: “Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me”

Canadian Stage is currently presenting the Canadian premiere of My Name is Lucy Barton, a play from 2018 adapted from the stage by Scottish playwright Rona Munro from the novel of the same name by Elizabeth Strout. I have not read Strout’s novel and can only comment on how Munro’s adaptation seemed to work as a play. Indeed, if a novel has been successfully adapted for the stage, it should not be necessary to know its source.

Yet, there is a paradox in seeing the novel as a play. Strout’s story so deeply concerns Lucy Barton’s loneliness that a communication from the page to an individual reader may be the best medium for expressing this loneliness. Sitting in an audience and learning about Lucy’s loneliness communally seemed to lessen the impact of impact of the subject. Despite that, there is no doubt that Munro’s adaption provides a virtuoso role for an actor. Maev Beaty’s performance of that role is one of the most impressive theatre performances in Toronto this year.

In the play, Beaty is both Lucy as narrator of her autobiographical story and Lucy as the story’s main character. As we learn, Lucy, living in New York City during the 1980s with her husband William and two daughters, has entered hospital for a routine operation. An infection of unknown cause, however, has caused her doctor to keep her in hospital for nine weeks until the infection is under control.

The core of the play concerns only five days during Lucy’s hospitalization. Lucy wakes up one morning to find her mother, whom she hasn’t seen for years, sitting at the foot of her bed. Lucy discovers that her husband William has paid for her mother’s trip, her mother’s first-ever travel of any kind, from the small (fictional) town of Amgash, Illinois, to New York. Lucy is astounded that her mother would even agree to travel. She is also amazed that her mother refuses to stay with her family and instead spends every moment of her five days with Lucy in the hospital.

The essential difficulty is that Lucy has only ever had a strained relationship with her mother. Lucy hated her life growing up in Amgash and when a scholarship to university allowed her to move away she felt she could finally be free of the past. When she brought her fiancé William to meet her parents and noted their disapproval of him, she left Amgash with no desire ever to return. Her parents view this abandonment as a betrayal. Lucy views her childhood as a nightmare.

Lucy and her brother and sister grew up in abject poverty. A frequent meal was molasses on bread. The garage where they lived on a farm had no heat. They children were beaten and forbidden to cry. Lucy’s father locked her in his truck to keep her out of the way when he worked. Lucy’s father returned from fighting World War II with what we would now call PTSD. Thoughts of the war would trigger periods of craziness in him. The Barton children grew up without television, newspapers or books. They were ridiculed at school for smelling bad. Nevertheless, school is where there were books and Lucy would stay there as long as she could to be warm, to escape her family and to read, which became her favourite pastime.

The play’s principal focus is how a mother and daughter who with so much negative history, yet who do not really know each other, can come to some kind of rapprochement. It is Lucy’s idea to have her mother tell her stories. These stories are entirely idle gossip about bad marriages and ill-fated affairs, but what Lucy appreciates is that at least her mother is speaking to her. Yet, whenever her mother lets slip something significant, such as her not feeling “safe” at home, she refuses to answer any of Lucy’s enquiries into the matter.

Mingled with Mrs. Barton’s neighbourhood tales and the reminiscences of childhood horrors that they evoke in Lucy are Lucy’s attempts to think of herself as a writer. A writer whom Lucy studies with tells her that writers must be “ruthless”, but the Lucy we see both as narrator and as character seems far too compassionate to be ruthless. We assume that such ruthlessness or speaking the truth as it is is something that Lucy as narrator still has to learn.

Also mingled with the themes of Lucy’s childhood and her vocation as a writer are attempts to incorporate the horrors of the 1980s, namely the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, into her narrative. While it was good that the play acknowledges this fact of life in New York at that time, I never felt that Strout via Munro was able to integrate the epidemic into her life story. Lucy’s story is about finding life despite the ordeal of her early years. Living in the midst of the ordeal of others is something that Strout via Munro can’t seem to make resonate.

Munro’s brilliant conception for her adaptation is to have one actor play both Lucy and Lucy’s mother and, indeed any of the other characters who crop up. Maev Beaty’s performance is an absolute triumph. She distinguishes between Lucy the narrator with her reticent, apologetic, self-correcting manner, and Lucy the character who is awkwardly trying to find her bearings in the strange situation her mother’s presence has caused. As Mrs. Barton, Beaty alters herself completely in carriage, facial expression and voice, taking on a harsh, rasping tone and a strong Midwestern accent. Beaty allows her Mrs. Barton to give the impression that Lucy is constantly judging her. When, in frustration, Lucy calls her parents “trash”, Beaty has Mrs. Barton rise up and violently berate her daughter. Mrs. Barton’s pride in her ancestors and her husband’s were the ones who “settled this country”, provides a chilling insight into a mode of thinking that is not yet dead.

Besides these two main figures, Beaty finds distinct voices for at least ten other characters, male and female, young and old, including Lucy’s father, sister, husband and even herself as a child. Sensitively directed by Jackie Maxwell, every pause and transition Beaty makes has significance. Indeed, with Beaty as her medium Maxwell gives the play a momentum that carries us ineluctably from the inconsequential to the eminently consequential so that we see larger and larger vistas of meaning beginning as humbly as they did with the meeting of an unhappy mother and daughter.

The Bluma Appel Theatre is really too large a space for such an intimate drama, although it is about the same size as the Bridge Theatre in London, where Munro’s adaptation premiered. The stage at the Bridge Theatre, was much smaller than that at the Bluma, where the playing area is narrow and extends the entire width of the stage. To fill that space Amelia Scott has designed ever-changing abstract projections that reflect whatever locations Lucy is in or thinking about. They range from overhead fluorescent lights for the hospital to waves of low green plants to reflect the crops of soybeans growing around the family farm in Amgash. Bonnie Beecher’s light works in concert with the projections to underscore the mood of every scene.

One peculiarity of Maxwell’s direction is that it is focussed almost entirely on stage right. Lucy’s bed and the chair where Lucy’s mother sits delineate this block of space as Lucy’s room, leaving the other half of the stage empty and underused.

Fans of Elizabeth Strout need not hesitate in seeing My Name is Lucy Barton. Neither should those how simply enjoy an magisterial performance such as Maev Beaty’s. The play concludes with Lucy exclaiming “All life amazes me”. This ends the play on an upbeat note, but given all the pain that permeates the action and all of Lucy’s expressions of continued loneliness, it’s very hard to understand exactly how Lucy reaches this conclusion. The play makes me want to turn to the novel to learn more and to the four other novels featuring Amgash and Lucy that Strout wrote after My Name is Lucy Barton.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Maev Beaty as Lucy Barton. © 2024 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.canadianstage.com.