✭✭✭✭✩

conceived and directed by Christian Barry

2b theatre company, Brigantine Room,

York Quay Centre, Toronto

April 4-19, 2007

The programme notes for Revisited vaguely claim the show is “inspired by the works of great early American writers.”  In fact, the first few of its 65 minutes reveal Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as its controlling source.  Fortunately, Revisited is a brilliant adaptation, scaling back Wilder’s already minimal presentation style almost to the point of unadorned storytelling. 

Revisited is “staged” at a large table seating only 28.  This simple concept turns the audience into a community.  We are the storyteller’s audience, a family, townspeople, witnesses and the dead who already know the patterns that life follows.  The versatile Steven McCarthy plays the Stage Manager and all the other roles save that of schoolgirl, then wife and mother, Lucy Moss, luminously performance by Michelle Monteith.  The surface of the table is the stage.  One handful of earth released in a line is Main Street, another crossing it is the railroad, another forming a mound is the graveyard.  Through such beautifully simple, inventive means director Christian Barry has McCarthy tell his tale.  Barry’s own ultraprecise lighting and Richard Feren’s highly realistic soundscape flow from McCarthy’s gestures so that it really does seem our storyteller conjures a world out of nothing.  The subtlety and emotion of Revisited will likely make even the sparest staging of Our Town seem overproduced.                         

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-04-09.

Photo: Steven McCarthy. ©Maxime Côté.