Reviews 2005
Reviews 2005
✭✭✩✩✩
by Gina Wilkinson, directed by Micheline Chevrier
CanStage, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto
March 10-April 2, 2005
Gina Wilkinson’s first play, My Mother’s Feet, a gender-reversed, Canadian Gothic How I Learned to Drive has no legs to stand on. It’s visually uninteresting, there’s little real dialogue and so many events are narrated, one wonders if the work wouldn’t have been better as a short story or radio play. Yet even a change of format would not resolve problems with the basic story.
Dan’s Mom (Jane Spidell), when not running the family like a fascist Kommandant, has been sexually abusing Dan (Tom Rooney) from age six through high school with the knowledge of his weakling father (Jerry Franken). Dan finally escapes her when he goes to university, but after he marries and has his own son, Mom begins stalking him. If this were only part of Dan’s paranoia it might be credible, but Wilkinson means this literally, so that we’re asked to believe a 70-year-old woman can secretly track Dan and his son over unmarked trails through a national park. Why does Dan’s Mom believe they are superior to the “peasants” around them? Why has she so confused control with love? We never find out. The story ends in melodrama as ludicrous as it is grotesque and implies a highly implausible reconciliation.
Rooney communicates the jet-black humour of the piece but seems far too stable for someone whose childhood and adolescence have been so horrifically stolen. Spidell ably distinguishes the chillingly obsessive Mom from Dan’s warm but alienated wife Ursula, but her fine acting can’t save so ill-conceived a play.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2005-03-17.
Photo: Tom Rooney and Jane Spidell. ©2005 Bruce Zinger.
2005-03-17
My Mother’s Feet