Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✩✩
by Daniel Karasik, directed by Jordan Tannahill
Tango Co., Tarragon Studio Theatre, Toronto
April 27-May 13, 2012
“Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter.” (Albert Camus, The Stranger)
If you have been puzzled by the sense of widespread disaffection and enervation among twentysomethings today, Daniel Karasik’s play The Innocents will give you some insight into what some call the “quarter-life crisis”. The 75-minute play is told in a series of punchy scenes that pits twentysomething over-achievers versus slackers and reveals how both miss out on a fuller life. The virtues of Karasik’s writing, however, tend to be undermined by play’s the overly schematic structure and Karasik’s willingness to force the plot to fit into a structure rather than let the arcs of the characters take their own course.
At the heart of the play is the relation between Stanley (Daniel Karasik), a 25-year-old wunderkind lawyer, and his age-matched client Aaron (Nathan Barrett), who has confessed to killing an elderly woman. Aaron’s uncooperativeness makes Stanley’s task nearly impossible, to the point the Stanley begins to wonder whether Aaron’s confession is some sort of death wish. Aaron had just broken up, again, with his girlfriend Jackie (Amelia Sargisson), has no goals in life and says that he’s too much a coward to commit suicide. Since no evidence other than Aaron’s confession links him to the crime, Stanley asks himself whether Aaron was involved in the woman’s death at all.
Meanwhile, Stanley’s rapid rise to the bar has led hot-shot journalist Laura (Virgilia Griffith) to interview Stanley about what motivated himself to reach such heights so fast. Laura, an over-achiever herself, is not above encouraging a personal relationship with her subject in order to know him better. A failed one-night stand reveals that work is Stanley’s life. How real people conduct themselves with each other in natural situations he is completely naive.
The point of pitting two over-achievers versus two slackers is to highlight what is lacking in the lives of each. Stanley has ambition but Aaron has known love. Laura has ambition but Jackie has ideals. Karasik’s structure is to have Stanley and Aaron change places as each realizes the virtues of the other’s life, with a symbolic exchange of love interests.
The main difficulty with the play is that Karasik has to force the plot to fit this scheme. Stanley violates any number of ethical rules in inviting Aaron’s ex-girlfriend over to his place or in granting Laura’s wish to get to know her subject intimately. Many details don’t make sense. Why does Stanley have the videotape of his interviews with Aaron at his home instead of locked up at the office? Why does Aaron’s involvement hinge on whether forensics finds Aaron's fingerprints on the woman’s pearl necklace? Unless, the pearls were unusually large, there would not be enough space for fingerprints and, in any case, thieves would grasp a necklace with their fist, not their fingertips. What really would determine whether the woman’s death was caused, as Aaron claims, by repeated attempts to pull off the necklace would be signs of trauma to the woman’s neck--a topic Karasik never raises because, without the delay for fingerprint results, the play would end in about ten minutes. At the end, since Stanley has won the attention of Jackie in his guise as lawyer and wins back her attention after he’s lost it still in that guise, it is rather unbelievable that he should feel it necessary to shed that guise to keep her.
It is ironic that in writing a play about the new “quarter-life crisis”, Karasik would adopt the same strategy that Peter Shaffer does in his several plays about the male mid-life crisis, most notable Equus (1973). In both there is a professional in a position of power (Stanley or Martin Dysart), who (unrealistically) becomes obsessed with a single client (Aaron or Alan Strang) who has committed a criminal act. Yet, the professional in both plays comes to see something “noble” in the criminal’s actions that highlights a crucial lack of substance in his own life.
When Aaron is allowed to postulate the philosophy that supports his lack of ambition, he cites the general pointlessness of life, wealth and property and the fact that we all have to die. In this, Karasik links the “quarter-life crisis” to the same sort of anomie that pervades the mentality of Mersault, the title character of Albert Camus’s existential novel L’Étranger (1942). There, as in Karasik, the character commits a pointless crime because of his nihilist world view. L’Étranger is early Camus, and what would help Karasik’s play is if there were some acknowledgement that nihilism is only an early stage in existentialism. By the time of Camus’s new novel, La Peste (1947), he had moved beyond this self-involved and self-destructive view towards the more positive notion that we are all in the same situation (i.e., living lives made pointless by death), what mankind should do to help others gets through life as best as possible. Karasik rather depressingly presents fame rather than a social conscience as Aaron’s way out of his claustrophobic mindset. According to Karasik slackers do not want to interact with a world they view as corrupt in order to preserve their innocence for as long as possible. Besides seeming like an excuse, the play itself shows that Stanley, who has engaged with the world, is still in many essential way innocent himself.
The play is tautly directed by Jordan Tannahill on the minimalist but well-conceived set he designed and lit with Rae Powell. Tannahill draws committed performances from all four actors.though, as Sargisson plays her, it’s difficult to believe that Jackie has any future in the recording industry.
The Innocents was first seen in Toronto at SummerWorks in 2010. In September 2011 it had its professional world premiere at the Staatstheater Mainz in German, where it continues to play. If the play is unnecessarily schematic, it also has many virtues. One is Karasik’s ability to write powerful scenes. Another is his ability, unlike many of his contemporaries, to avoid having his characters all speak alike but rather to have his characters speak at different levels of discourse. Stanley retreat to pedantry is often comic when compared to Jackie’s natural speech, Aaron’s brusqueness or Laura’s arch calculation. The Innocents is thus a showcase for the talent of all involved and I look forward to seeing more work from the cast and director and to seeing Karasik’s next work
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Nathan Barrett, Daniel Karasik, Amelia Sargisson (reclining) and Virgilia Griffith. ©2012 Jordan Tannahill.
For tickets, visit www.tangoco.net.
2012-04-30
The Innocents