Reviews 2001
Reviews 2001
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by Jennifer Brewin, Leah Cherniak, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Alisa Palmer and Martha Ross, directed by P.J. Hammond
Alumnae Theatre, Toronto
November 23-December 15, 2001
“An Empty Attic”
"The Attic, the Pearls and the Three Fine Girls", a collective creation by five women from Theatre Columbus, premiered at the Theatre Centre in Toronto in 1995 and was later remounted at the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in 1997. The five women--Jennifer Brewin, Leah Cherniak, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Alisa Palmer and Martha Ross--have all gone on to greater things and their creation has received numerous productions across the country. Reviews of the original production and its remount always mention how slight the work is: it "doesn't plumb great depths nor scale great heights" as John Coulbourn wrote in 1997. But what made the play succeed was the chemistry among the three sisters. Now in 2001 the play feels slighter still, like little more than extended sitcom episode. And in the revival now playing at the Alumnae Theatre there is no sororal chemistry to redeem it.
The 80-minute play takes place almost entirely in the attic of the Fine family home. Here we see the three Fine sisters--Josephine (Jojo), Jayne and Angelica (Jelly)--in flashbacks playing games with each other as children and in the present playing games with each other as adults. The main theme of the play is how the girls' past perceptions of each other have continued to determine their present interactions. Jojo is constantly putting on airs and throwing fits, Jayne eggs her on and torments Jelly, both treat Jelly as baby and Jelly's job is to reconcile her two older sisters when their fights get out of hand. As they gather for their father's funeral and plan and carry out the party his last wishes dictate, they react to each other just as they did before, but now each has secret anxieties. Jojo, a divorced Brechtian scholar, fears she will remain childless. Jayne, a high-flying stockbroker, is carrying on a lesbian affair. Jelly, an artist, has had to spend six months and the sisters' inheritance in caring for their father at home, and she is pregnant.
The play consists of nothing but the girls' posing, fights, tears and overheard confessions, with no clue whether the three will ever resolve their differences. Then in the final five minutes the authors decide to have the three suddenly recognize the fruitlessness of their quarrels and accept each other for who they are. It feels like a tacked-on happy ending rather than anything rising organically from what has gone before, but that would be difficult since what has gone before has been so insubstantial.
One can believe that the original cast of Martha Ross (Jojo), Ann-Marie MacDonald (Jayne) and Leah Cherniak (Jelly) had the panache to make this bit of fluff a delightful amusement. Sadly the present cast of recent theatre school graduate does not have the technique much less anything nearing panache to make the play seem more than a pointless trifle. The main problem is that the acting styles of the three actors are so different that they seem hardly to be in the same play let alone seem like sisters. Jill Morrison (Jojo) is so mannered and so over-the-top that she seems to be playing a cartoon character and not any person you might know. Erin Shields (Jayne) is the most confident on stage and does project a real, more rounded character, but her interactions with the others too often fall back on techniques more appropriate to sitcoms.
The symbolically-named Jelly is the quiet one who ultimately holds the family together. This is the most difficult role in the play since the actor has to communicate presence and strength while constantly being ignored by the others. Rather than being the quiet centre of the play, Tina Yeung-Moore pretty much vanishes entirely. Except for two or three key scenes she seems to be sleepwalking through the part disengaged from what she is saying. Only in the various flashbacks to their girls' childhood do the three actors' styles seem to mesh and the play to work as it should.
After the finely detailed work she produced in "Talley's Folly" last year, I am surprised that P.J. Hammond could not coax subtler, more integrated performances from the cast in "The Attic". She rises to the occasion in the play's final minutes, but the previous 75 would have had to be toned down considerably for the ending not to feel as artificial as it is. She does make sure that the authors' (rather obvious) symbols carry their full weight, but given the performances they seem like islands of meaning in a sea of noise.
Hammond has assembled the same team that made "Talley's Folly" such a success and their work is equally successful in "The Attic". The play has an ideal venue in the Studio situated in the real attic of the Alumnae Theatre. Stewart Vanderlinden has struck just the right balance between enough clutter to suggest a storage space of forgotten relics and enough organized space to suggest the girls' oft-used retreat. Michael Spence's lighting is a bit too bright to suit an attic, but he does clearly signal which scenes take place outside the given time and place of the main action. Dorothy Wilson's costumes are excellent in defining the personalities of Jojo and Jayne, but she gives little visual expression to Jelly's artistic temperament.
Since "The Attic" was written there have been a number of far more substantial plays dealing with the relation of sisters. Most notable among these is British playwright Shelagh Stephenson's "The Memory of Water" (1996) seen in Toronto in 1998 and 2000. A comedy covering much the same ground as the authors of "The Attic" (albeit with six characters), Stephenson is able to extrapolate larger themes concerning the passage of time and the erosion and creation of memory. "The Attic", by contrast, seems to have been created primarily as a vehicle for the comedic talents of three of the co-authors. Without those three and without any larger resonance, "The Attic" seems very empty.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Erin Shields. ©2008 SummerWorks.
2001-12-05
The Attic, the Pearls and the Three Fine Girls