Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✭✩✩
by Jon Robin Baitz, directed by Victor Correia
Little Guy Productions, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
June 21-30, 2007
Presenting the Canadian premiere of The Paris Letter is clearly a labour of love for the independent company Little Guy Productions. The 2004 play by American Jon Robin Baitz, now creator and producer of television’s “Brothers & Sisters,” would like to be an epic contemporary tragedy, but its reach exceeds its grasp. The result is closer to a gay take on Danielle Steele than Sophocles.
The play covers 40 years in the friendship of Anton Kilgallan (Peter Higginson) and New York investment banker Sandy Sonnenberg (Alastair Love) with the elder Anton serving as narrator. Sandy’s “tragedy” is to have denied his homosexuality. After a four-month affair with the young Anton (Stevie Jay), the young Sandy (Scott MacLeod), seeks corrective psychotherapy with a grim psychiatrist (also Alastair Love) famed for “curing” homosexuals. The newly converted hetero Sandy follows his father into the family business, gets rich, and marries but eventually has an affair with another man that leads to his bankruptcy and that man’s suicide. For the play to be a tragedy one event should necessarily lead to another. Here it is not Sandy’s self-repression that is the immediate cause of his meltdown but rather his having fallen in love with a white-collar criminal, something that could happen to any poor judge of character gay or straight. Baitz’s play hammers home the simple moral “Accept your sexuality.” That’s fine as far as interpersonal relations go, but insufficient for the play’s additional pretensions as an epic survey of the United States at the end of the 20th century.
Victor Correia directs this bare bones production cleanly and efficiently. It is well cast but still appeared under-rehearsed on opening night. Higginson has a mellifluous voice and adopts an appropriate tone of melancholy for his narration. Alastair Love is filled with anger and despair as the older Sandy and creepy severity as the psychiatrist. MacLeod is excellent as the tortured young Sandy, a man who seeks a painful obliteration of passion from his life so he can succeed. Jay imagines what a younger Higginson as Anton would sound like though this tends to make his dialogue stilted and quite unlike his second role as Sandy’s jittery future criminal lover. The most impressive performance comes from Anita de Yonge as Sandy’s wife Katie, whom we see both vibrant with youth and later racked with cancer. She also has a short brilliant turn as the young Sandy’s unthinking patrician mother gleefully slumming it at her son’s favourite Village bistro.
The performances will only improve in timing and precision with the run that coincides with Pride Week. The play will then be able to preach to even more of the converted, or is that the unconverted?
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-06-22.
Photo: Peter Higginson.
2007-06-22
The Paris Letter