Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
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written and directed by Daniel MacIvor
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
April 4-May 6, 2012
“Three Bland Women”
We are used to having Daniel MacIvor surprise us with every new play, but Was Spring, his latest, is not the kind of surprise one looks forward to. “Derivative” and “cliché-ridden” are not adjectives I would ever have associated with MacIvor, but they are the only ones to describe Was Spring accurately. The play is only 75 minutes long, but it seems as if MacIvor is struggling to fill out even those few minutes.
Set and lighting designer Kimberly Purtell has arranged the audience in Tarragon Theatre Extra Space in an ell-shape looking as the slightly raised square performing area in the corner of wooden planks with smoked glass backing the two sides. There are three chairs. Taking the foremost is Clare Coulter as Kitty, an 80-year-old woman in a retirement home who is not at all happy about what has happened to her. Kitty was living in her own apartment until she tries to ask a young woman for a cigarette. When the woman noticed that Kitty had been living with a long-unrepaired broken window and a bucket full of urine, she notified social services who placed Kitty in a home. Kitty hates the idiotic prohibition of cigarettes and nuts and especially the “smily-faced girl” who speaks to her as if she were a child and tries to get her to take her pills.
So far MacIvor’s satire of the pains mentally active people suffer in nursing homes is comically accurate if not especially original. Then the play’s other two characters enter--the cheery plus-sized girl Kit (Jessica Moss) and the bitter middle-aged Kath (Caroline Gillis), who seems to be imploding from the anger she carries within her. Our first impression is that these two must be Kitty’s daughter and granddaughter. But the initial to-do about the similarity of their names already tips us off that the new arrivals are really Kitty as she was at two earlier times.
What also tips us off is that we have seen this kind of play before. Michel Tremblay wrote Albertine in Five Times in 1984 and, as the title suggests, portrayed the same woman at five different periods in her life and had these avatars interact as MacIvor does, criticizing the follies and delusions they held. Edward Albee won his third Pulitzer Prize for Three Tall Women that premiered in 1991 that depicts the same woman at three different ages. As in MacIvor they interact, correct each other’s version of the past, and just as MacIvor does, the play concludes with the three collectively remembering the happiest moment of their life. If you feel the concept and execution of Was Spring seem familiar it’s because they are, and the plays both by Tremblay and Albee are far more complex.
The story the three women tell in MacIvor’s play is also familiar and told with little suspense. Kit becomes pregnant by trying to win the love a boy she has a crush on in school. Kit married someone she doesn’t love to keep up appearances and becomes the unhappy Kath. Like too many parents Kath decides to live through her daughter and make sure she avoids her mother’s mistakes. Of course, a parent who is too close only drives the child away. MacIvor’s discussion of male-female relations sounds embarrassingly like pop-psych--women are little princesses waiting to be rescued by a prince while men are little boys who want to be king and are frustrated that their father already rules the kingdom.
Coulter’s role is the richest of the three and it would have been just as well if MacIvor had conceived of the play as a solo piece just for her since she is so wonderfully able to bring out nuance and meaning through subtle emphases or pauses. Both Gillis and Moss convey the single note MacIvor has given their characters but there is little else for them to do.
The play itself is very abstract. We learn of a house, a lake, a rock, a barn, a telephone call--but MacIvor seems deliberately to want to keep them vague. I suspect that Was Spring is an attempt to write a play that begins as prose but gradually becomes purely poetic. The problem is that poetry is memorable because of specific images not generalities.
MacIvor has contributed so much to Canadian drama he has secured a firm place in the canon. But as the Roman poet Horace famously noted, “Even Homer nods”, so we should be able to take it in our stride that a great playwright like MacIvor can not only nod but sleepwalk on occasion. Let’s hope he’s back in form next time.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jessica Moss, Clare Coulter, Caroline Gillis. ©2012 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.
2012-04-12
Was Spring