Reviews 2002
Reviews 2002
✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by Daniel Brooks
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
March 5-April 7, 2002
"Good in Theory"
In Paris last month the Théâtre de la Cité Internationale presented Plato's philosophical dialogue "Gorgias" as a play reasoning that "[l]es hommes prennent plaisir à l'affrontement des idées" ("people take pleasure in confronting ideas"). Daniel Brooks's new play "The Good Life" makes much the same optimistic assumption. Not only is it based on Plato's "Symposium" but it appropriates large swaths from Plato's text. In his director's note Brooks says the play as "an unfinished work of fiction". That's just as well since, although it confronts us with essential philosophical ideas, as drama it is only intermittently successful.
The central question here, as in the "Symposium", is "What is love?" A happily married couple, Gina and Dan, are contrasted with an unhappily married couple, Chris and Mary, who yet again are on the brink of separating. The crisis comes when Dan leaves Gina for a young magazine interviewer Eve. Gina consoles herself with another young interviewer Gord. Paradoxically, the warring couple stay together while the understanding couple do not. Which is the true example of love-a couple who split when love is not perfect, a couple who stay together when love is not perfect or two affairs never expected to last? Unlike the normal procedure of good drama where philosophic questions are implied by the action, here the questions are stated and examined outright while what action there is provides illustrative examples.
As a director Daniel Brooks is famous for a minimalist approach that can make a complex epic like Goethe's "Faust, Part 1" absolutely clear and make minimalist works like Beckett's "Endgame" or Pinter's "Betrayal" echo with complex resonance. As a writer in this his first non-collaborative effort, Brooks is also a minimalist, but unlike Beckett or Pinter, he has stripped is drama of so much detail that only the abstract remains. We know virtually nothing of the background of the six characters except their relation to the ideas of the play and thus can engage with them intellectually not emotionally. This may well be Brooks's intention since it follows the model of Plato, who abhorred the emotions aroused by the theatre. Nevertheless, we are in the theatre and it is no accident that the most effective scene in the play is Gina's highly emotional reaction to Dan's announcement that he is leaving her.
As if the question "What is love?" were not general enough, Brooks further expands his theme to include pre-Socratic questioning of the unity of the self and, as the title suggests, the central question of classical philosophy, "What is the good life?" This "good life" ("eudaimonia" in Greek) is far from the life of indulgence in common parlance, but the state of having a life blessed with happiness. Aristotle says it can be achieved through moderation. Plato via Socrates (and Brooks via Chris) says it can be achieved through contemplation, i.e. through philosophy itself. Brooks seems to doubt it exists. While his play owes much to Plato, Brooks also satirizes him through three males characters all more willing to respond to a direct question with abstractions than to give a simple answer.
Brooks's structure is also minimalist. Like Plato's dialogues the play is composed of a series of interviews, some formal, some conversational, nearly all of them in a question and answer format. When characters have a long speech to make, they announce it and use one of the two standing microphones on stage to deliver it. At the central dinner party (that is what "symposium" means), Brooks has two characters at a time use these microphones for their private conversations. By thus emphasizing the nature of the play-as-play, including a discussion of possible audience reactions and references to the Tarragon Theatre itself, Brooks further intellectualizes the already intellectualized proceedings.
Thus it falls to the actors, aided by Brooks's taut direction, to makes these abstractions live in the theatre. Tamsin Kelsey (Gina) gives the best performance of the show. It helps that hers is the most fully realized character, but it is chiefly her intensity, especially in her gradual breakdown after Dan says he's leaving, that engages us with the play and gives us an inkling of what the whole work might have been. Guillermo Verdecchia (Dan) is our wry and witty guide. We suspect that Dan uses his theory of the fluidity of the self to rationalize his attraction to Eve, but Verdecchia's mastery of comic delivery helps make this pompous cad ingratiating.
Bob Martin (Chris) and Tracy Wright (Mary) have the misfortune to play abstractions. Chris, a hyperintellectual, patronizes Mary as if she were a beginning philosophy student while Mary, the frustrated sensualist, rages against Chris despite knowing his nature. The two are linked by a symbiosis Brooks does not delineate. He has made them so different and so antagonistic, it's impossible to see how they could be a real couple--unless they symbolize the conflict between the mind (Chris) and the body (Mary). Martin is able to give Chris enough of the personality of an ivory tower dweller to make him seem real. Wright, however, has the strange habit at smiling at her own lines with the negative result that we can't believe anything Mary says.
Waneta Storms (the inarticulate Eve) and Luke Kirby (Gord) give such fine performances, one wishes their roles were larger. A final tableau linking them is forced since Brooks gives them no interaction beforehand.
Brooks's production team gives the show the cool, spareness we've seen in other of his shows. John Thompson's set extends the black walls of the auditorium to surround a stage occupied only by a sleek bed, dining table and chairs contrasting with older armchairs where most of the dialogues take place. He has brought out more links among the characters through colour and cut than Brooks has with the text. Andrea Lundy's precise lighting frequently calls attention to itself as befits such a self-conscious play. Richard Feren's music conjures up just the right sense of urban anomie.
Accepting that this is a work in progress makes many of the play's problems easier to take. Brooks deserves credit for trying to resurrect the play of ideas in Canada. Yet, as it is, it’s no match for other recent plays of ideas. Unlike Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen", the play does not have a simple structure that informs the whole. Unlike Tom Stoppard's "The Real Thing", the play lacks variety of invention. Unlike both, Brooks wants to deconstruct his play by turning the action into simple illustrations of abstract ideas. I say: show us the play of shadows; let us find the light that makes them.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Guillermo Verdecchia. ©2002 Celine Sak.
2002-03-09
The Good Life