Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✩✩✩
by Brendan Gall, directed by Gina Wilkinson
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
November 10-December 12, 2010
“Sometimes it’s just a mess,” says one of Brendan Gall’s characters about how some films turn out. The same could be said for Gall’s latest play, Wide Awake Hearts, receiving its world premiere at the Tarragon. Not only does the play trade entirely in clichés, but neither the plot nor the characters make sense.
Gall’s plot calls for a screenwriter/producer named A (Gord Rand) to cast his wife B (Lesley Faulkner) and his best friend C (Raoul Bhaneja) as lovers in his latest film. As soon as B asks that C stay with them instead of a grungy motel, A begins to suspect that the two may have had an earlier relationship and that proximity may rekindle it. He then calls in a new film editor D (Maev Beaty), who happens to be C’s girlfriend. Repeatedly the question is asked why A would cast B and C as lovers. It is never answered. It also never to occurs to Gall that A would most likely fire C if he suspected impropriety, but then the use of logic would ruin his plot. The appearance of D is completely unnecessary and functions mostly to lengthen the the play to 80 minutes. A play can’t travel far without a believable plot or believable characters. We simply don’t care what happens. Gall’s theme about the bleeding of reality into fiction and vice versa is as old as drama and film, but unlike plays by Pirandello or Stoppard where we sometimes wonder what is or is not real, Gall’s juxtapositions are immediately decipherable and he adds no twist to this theme that hasn’t been done, and done better, innumerable times before.
Gall’s dialogue for the realistic scenes is written entirely in setups and punchlines, while, oddly enough, his dialogue for the film scenes actually evokes emotion. Without actors of the calibre of Rand, Bhaneja and Beaty, the play would be unendurable. They, more than Gall, strive to make the characters less two-dimensional. Beaty is especially adept at suggesting complexities beneath the surface. Faulkner is not in the same league and seems happy as a cardboard cutout. Wide Awake Hearts is one of those strange examples of a production that is much more interesting than the play it is meant to illustrate. Lorenzo Savoini’s video design that eventually comprises excerpts of famous films projected onto his set, itself a photograph of a set gone askew, says more intriguing things about the relation of illusion and reality than anything in Gall’s play. The greatest mystery is how Gall’s play was deemed ready for production at all.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-11-11.
Photo: Raoul Bhaneja, Gord Rand and Lesley Faulkner. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2010-11-11
Wide Awake Hearts