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by Mark O’Rowe, directed by Mitchell Cushman

Outside the March, Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto

November 23-December 16, 2012

“Irish Storytelling at its Best”

Mirvish Productions could not have chosen a better play to launch its new Off-Mirvish Second Stage Series than Terminus.  The Outside the March staging of Mark O’Rowe’s 2007 play was a hit at this years SummerWorks Festival where it won the award for Best Production.  Terminus is an example of Irish storytelling at its best.  Under director Mitchell Cushman, three fine actors bring O’Rowe’s fantastic text to vivid life making the play an absolutely terrific experience.    

To transfer the intimate play to the huge Royal Alexandra Theatre, director Cushman and designer Nick Blais have come up with the ingenious idea of placing an audience of 200 on the stage itself facing outward into the auditorium.  At the very lip of the stage Blais has placed two wing-like screens made up of numerous plastic bands.  In between these “wings” is a gap slightly more than shoulder-width apart.  For each of their scenes the actors stand on a small raised keystone-shaped platform between the two wings with their backs to the enormous void of the Royal Alex auditorium.  Blais lights the wings in extremely inventive ways, often making them look, indeed, like a pair of wings – a visual symbol perfectly suited to a play where flight is a central metaphor.  The actors thus act literally on the edge of the stage while their performances keep us literally on the edge of our seats.

Terminus tells of one extraordinary night in modern Dublin when the lives of three characters become bizarrely intertwined.  They are known in the programme only as “A”, “B”, and “C” because we never learn their names in the play.  What we do learn is how the life of one character impinges in ways neither we nor the character can imagine on lives of the other two.  “A” (Maev Beaty), “B” (Ava Jane Markus) and “C” (Adam Kenneth Wilson) speak in extended monologues in that alphabetical sequence several times, each telling the story of what happened that one night, completely unaware of how the other two characters are involved. 

The idea of fashioning a play of sequential monologues is not new.  Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Faith Healer (1979) and Molly Sweeney (1994) are both constructed that way also using three speakers in a play.  There are, however, many differences.  Friel’s setting is always the countryside, whereas O’Rowe’s is almost defiantly urban.  O’Rowe cycles through his three speakers more often that does Friel.  Friel’s monologues are written in a genteel heightened prose, whereas O’Rowe’s are written in rhyming verse, a ballad-like form that deliberately contrasts with his frequent use of coarse language and the gruesome scenes of sex, violence and humiliation his speakers describe.  O’Rowe seems to be saying that if we today were to make ballads of our urban experiences, this is what they would be like.

Since part of the excitement of the play is in discovering gradually how the stories of the three speakers are related, I will refrain from revealing these connections myself.  A short portrait of each speaker will have to suffice.  “A” is a teacher who also volunteers on a distress line.  One of the callers is in turmoil because she is about to terminate a pregnancy after four months.  The caller gives her name and “A” recognizes it as one of her former students.  After work she makes it her mission to track down the young woman and convince her to keep the baby.  What she discovers is that the woman has somehow fallen into the power of a loathsome woman named Celine and her lesbian gang, known for their random acts of cruelty and violence. 

Meanwhile, “B”, a young woman who lives alone has been asked to go on a date with a couple she knows who have a male friend with them.  She hesitates because her friend’s husband constantly flirts with her, but when she ruins her own dinner she decides to go along.  After a night of too much drinking the four make their way to the top of a construction crane where, to her dismay, “B” discovers that the evening was planned so that her friend could have sex with the male stranger and her friend’s husband could have sex with her.  In trying to escape her friend’s husband she falls from the crane but is saved just before impact by supernatural intervention.

“C” at first comes across as a hopeless geek.  He goes to a bar and chooses the least attractive girl there to dance with since it’s only with that type that he thinks he’ll have a chance.  Young men outside the disco taunt him as he goes home with the girl.  Our sympathy for “C”, however, takes an abrupt about face when we find that his fear of women manifests itself in murder.  The girl he’s picked up is not the first.  And the additional murders that ensue he regards with cool amusement. 

After the first round of monologues, O’Rowe leaves us in a state of perplexity since the stories and characters are so different it seems impossible that they could have any relation to each other.  Each subsequent round of monologues brings us closer to fitting the pieces of the puzzle together finally providing us with a tall tale, breathtaking both in its audacity and in the precision of its construction. 

Each of the actors has fully mastered an Irish accent as well as O’Rowe’s playfully rhyming verse.  O’Rowe’s vocabulary and subject matter may be rough but he is undeniably in love with language itself and its power to brings all five senses alive as it draws us into a tale we are powerless to escape.  Beaty and Markus play immediately sympathetic characters – Beaty’s is brave, while Markus’s is timid – who encounter grotesque challenges to the image they have of themselves.  Wilson is perfect in embodying the “banality of evil”, to use Hannah Arendt’s phrase about Nazi Germany, in that “C” does not regard the extreme violence he perpetrates as anything unusual.  He is so inured to it he often finds it comic.  Wilson is mesmerizing as he creates this portrait of evil as a combination of complete lack of self-esteem and a supreme indifference to others.

Unlike Friel’s monologue plays, O’Rowe’s is not concerned with presenting different points of view of the same events.  Instead, the play is constructed as a thriller where we can’t wait to learn the next piece of information to complete the action and find out how it ends.  Other than involving us in the sheer thrill of being taken out of ourselves through a story, Terminus challenges our notions of how we make moral judgements.  We sympathize with “A” and “B” to such an extent that we somehow excuse the gruesome actions they perform.  We come to fear and detest “C”, but O’Rowe gives him a sense of humour and self-deprecation that constantly threaten to make us find sympathy for him, too, even against our will.  Masterfully acted, directed and designed, Terminus will take you on a wild ride you will never forget.

              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Maev Beaty as “A”. ©2012 Josie Di Luzio.

For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.