Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
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by Rose Cullis, directed by Kelly Thornton
Nightwood Theatre, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
March 7-25, 2012
“A Façade Not Worth Maintaining”
The Happy Woman by Rose Cullis is a very unhappy piece of writing. The structure is lopsided, the plot and characters are poorly managed and the conclusion is unsatisfying. The tone switches awkwardly between satiric and tragic and it is hard to know what, if anything, the playwright is trying to communicate. The acting is of a uniformly high level, but the actors have an uphill struggle in trying to make sense of the play.
Denyse Karn’s delightful design in bright cheerful colours with cutouts of white fluffy clouds floating in the sky looks like the set for a children’s show. On stage right the neighbour BellaDonna’s porch is dark green and Karn has costumed the character to blend in with her surroundings. On stage left is the yellow-and-orange kitchen of Margaret, presumably the “happy woman” of the title whose June Cleaver outfits also blend in with her surroundings. In between is a non-realistic blue two-storey house like a child’s cutout. Here neither inhabitant fits in in terms of colour. Christian, Margaret’s son, wears light blues and plaids but never the intense blue of the house. His pregnant wife Stasia is all in pink and completely contrasts with her environment. Cassie, Margaret’s daughter and Christian’s sister, wears reds and blacks and thus fits in nowhere in the world of the play.
The colour-coding and the intentionally naive design of the set would suggest that the play were some kind of fable. In her “Playwright’s Notes”, Rose Cullis states that the play is a “tragi-comic exploration of: the nature of happiness; performance and authenticity; the regulation of sexuality--particularly as it relates to women’s bodies and desires; and knowing versus blindness”. With so many themes to cover it’s no wonder the result is muddled.
Margaret (Barbara Gordon) is a perfectly happy woman, content with the beauty and wonder of the world and looking forward to the upcoming birth of her first grandchild. Her Pollyannaish world view is the exact opposite of her cynical, or perhaps more realistic, neighbour BellaDonna (Maria Vacratsis), who thinks about global warming, man’s inhumanity to man and the inevitable apocalypse man bring down upon himself. In a narrower sphere BellaDonna, has been an observer of the events in the neighbourhood for 32 years and knows quite well the forms of depravity that take place in seemingly “normal” households, including Margaret’s. Over the years she has thought of calling Margaret’s attention to these facts, but given Margaret’s willful blindness, BellaDonna knows Margaret would disregard anything she had to tell her.
Meanwhile, in the blue house, Christian (Martin Happer) is struggling to be as “happy” as his mother. His task is made difficult by the two women in his life. His wife Stasia (Ingrid Rae Doucet), now eight-months pregnant, is have an extraordinarily negative reaction to her pregnancy. She is delusional and in a state of near-constant anxiety that the child she carries is deformed. At the same time, Christian has the problem of his younger sister Cassie (Maev Beaty), a self-proclaimed performance artist, who is becoming too closely involved with a married man in their neighbourhood whom everyone regards as a “creep”.
The first problem with Cullis’s play is that she uses the entire first act to set up these relationships but with no sense of drama or tension Since there is no development, each of the characters is left merely to repeat to the others the shallow definition of their character--Margaret” “I’m so happy”; Stasia:” My baby will be monster”; Martin: “Things will turn out all right”; Cassie: “I can do whatever I want”.
Cullis waits until Act 2 to allow any significant revelations or drama conflicts to take place. Stasia gives birth, rejects the baby, is taken to the psych ward and Margaret raises the baby until Stasia is “well”. Cassie, we discover has quite a significant for being messed up sexually and it is extremely perverse of the playwright to have kept us in the dark about something so important for the entire first act. From the information revealed in Act 2, Christian, too, ought to have significant psychological conflicts, but Cullis either believes that men have entirely different reactions to similar events than to women, or she does not think to investigate Christian’s thoughts. As for Stasia, Martin tells, as per a Psych 101 textbook, her in Act 2 that all her paranoia concerning her baby derived from Stasia projecting conflicts she had within her own family onto her unborn child. This might be enlightening except that Cullis has neglected to tell us anything before or after this remark about Stasia’s family, much less what conflicts would so strongly have affected Stasia.
Cullis would like us to think that the pressure of pretending to be “normal” around her mother and brother becomes so great that in Act 2 she finally blows up and reveals all the family secrets to Margaret at one blow. Margaret’s reaction is, as one might expect, dismissive. She can’t accept anything that would undermine her happiness. Then, in an almost comically melodramatic scene accompanied by thunder and lightning, Margaret, wanders out in her nightdress and confess that, yes, she also has disturbing dreams and did indeed know about all the dire doings going on under her roof. After this, she is back to normal with so trace of her stormy confession about her.
The play ends with a happy family scene involving Margaret, Christian, Stasia and her baby without the slightest mention the infant’s previous rejection. Cassie decides to leave town, her psychological problems completely unresolved. We can only assume that the conclusion is meant to be ironic, but unfortunately neither Cullis nor director Kelly Thornton presents it as such. Escape and denial are thus affirmed as the keys to happiness.
All five actors give exceptionally fine performances within the limits of Cullis’s and Thornton’s vision of them. We welcome Vacratsis’s presence as a mordant voice of reality in a play where everyone else is caught up in fantasies about who they are. Barbara Gordon is well cast as an unwaveringly positive thinker, but, once we know more about the past, one would welcome some sense of struggle in her in keeping up her façade of “happiness”. Indeed, one can’t avoid thinking that Cullis has sacrificed the drama of confrontation for the sake of having Margaret maintain this meaningless façade.
If Doucet strikes us as extremely annoying rather than pitiable, it is not her fault. She captures Stasia’s intensity perfectly but Cullis has simply not provided her with enough variations in expressing her anxiety, when she could easily have worked in Stasia’s past family history to make us more sympathetic to Stasia’s plight. Happer is a stolid Christian and, just as he is written, compartmentalizes his feelings, again, like Margaret at the expense of any real drama.
Despite the title, Beaty’s Cassie really seems to be the central character. She is excellent as playing someone who is outwardly unmanageable and inwardly tortured. Cullis provides us with five examples of Cassie’s performance art but they are so feeble, we wonder if Cullis has any real knowledge of what contemporary performance art is. With such an angry, conflicted character as Cassie, one would think this would manifest itself in her art in some way and serve a therapeutic function, but Cullis presents us with nothing of the kind and thus misses the opportunity of giving us insight into a troubled mind.
At the end we admire the heroic effort the cast has made in trying to bring this shallow, muddled play to life. But we can help wishing the play had been viewed with a more critical dramaturgical eye and had been radically rewritten to give it more focus, purpose and dramatic conflict before it was presented to the public.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Maria Vacratsis, Martin Happer, Maev Beaty, Ingrid Rae Doucet and Barbara Gordon. ©2012 Guntar Kravis.
For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.
2012-03-09
The Happy Woman