✭✭✭✩✩

by Joan MacLeod, directed by Richard Rose

Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

November 13-December 15, 2013

“Four Compass Points – Empty Centre”

B.C. playwright Joan MacLeod has won numerous awards over the years including the Siminovitch Prize in theatre in 2011, but like most playwrights some of her work is tightly focussed like Another Home Invasion (2009) and other work is more diffuse like Homechild (2006).  MacLeod’s latest play, The Valley, falls into the latter category.  It sets up a parallel between two families dealing with mental illness but the longer the action continues the less satisfying it becomes.  The excellence of the acting from all four member of the cast only emphasizes the lack of clarity at the heart of the play.

The Tarragon Theatre Mainspace has been completely altered for this productions.  The audience is divided into two halves on the east and west sides of the auditorium facing each other across a square playing area.  Graeme Thomson has divided this area into four quadrants with a shiny-surfaced circle in the centre.  Each of the quadrants is primarily, but not exclusively, the domain of one of the four characters.  The dominant figure in the southwest quadrant with the kitchen table is the middle-aged mother Sharon (Susan Coyne).  The southeast quadrant with the rumpled bed is inhabited mostly by Sharon’s teenaged son Connor (Colin Mercer). The northeast quadrant directly across from his has a sofa where Janie (Michelle Monteith) feels trapped.  The northwest quadrant directly across from Sharon’s kitchen is dominated by a desk where Janie’s husband Dan (Ian Lake), a police constable does his work. 

When the actors have finished a scene, they sit in chairs in the front rows of the audience.  This seems to indicate that their characters do not own the quadrant where they are most often seen.  Janie and Dan use the bed and kitchen table as theirs on occasion.  What we’ve taken to be the front door of Janie and Dan’s house becomes the front door to Sharon and Connor’s house at the end.  Richard Rose’s direction is so clear that there is never any confusion about where we are.  Given that the fantasy world that Connor creates in his novel is also divided into quadrants, Connor’s alter-ego in a green quadrant, one wonders why Rose or Thomson didn’t think of colour-coding the quadrants is some way to reflect this.

Thomson’s set emphasizes the many parallels that MacLeod’s story is based on.  There are two families on opposite sides of the stage.  On the south side are Sharon and Connor, who she comes to learn is schizophrenic.  On the north side are Dan and Janie, a former drug addict suffering depression after the birth of their first child.  Sharon and Dan are authority figures who their dependents need for stability but against whom they also rebel in attempts to assert their freedom.  Sharon and Janie are both mothers struggling with raising sons.  Sharon can’t find a way to relate to a son who has become alien to her, while Janie herself feels alien to her infant son Zeke. 

Dan and Connor are the two men whose confrontation forms the crux of the plot, such as it is.  Connor has come home after only two months of university.  As Sharon probes deeper, Connor struggling against her prying all the way, she eventually finds that he had begun experiencing episodes of paranoid schizophrenia.  Before this discovery she had thought he was depressed and encouraged him to get a job to get him out of his bed and out of the house.  He did so but then was arrested by police for causing a disturbance on the SkyTrain by brandishing a “light sabre” made of rolled-up paper fliers.  It is Dan who has to subdue and arrest him.  MacLeod has Connor suffer a broken jaw during the arrest.  She should, however, do more research into how much force is needed to break a jaw because as it stands the manner in which Connor’s jaw is broken and the speed with which it is treated lacks credibility.

The second link between the two families is that Sharon launches a complaint against Dan for using undue force in arresting her son.  Much to his surprise, Dan finds that Janie is sympathetic to Connor’s case and she even reads the manuscript of the fantasy novel Connor wrote in order to understand him. 

The difficulty with the play is that establishing all these parallels does not actually constitute a plot.  The confrontation between Dan and Connor and Sharon’s complaint lead to nothing.  Over time as Connor’s meds start working, he starts to improve.  Over time as Dan repeatedly neglects Janie’s statements that she’s is not doing well, Janie’s mental state declines.  The plays begins as it ends – a study of two relationships involving mental illness, resolved or worsened by the passage of time.  The conclusions of Act 1 and Act 2 were so weak the night I attended that the ushers had to start the applause to let the rest of the audience know the acts had ended.

Inspired by the 2007 tasering death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport, buried in MacLeod’s system of parallels is plea for greater sensitivity from the police.  As she says in her Playwright’s Note, “I thought about how my perception of the police changed and didn't change throughout the years - and how much policing has changed in my lifetime. These days on the downtown eastside in Vancouver over half the police calls are related to issues around mental illness. As I began to write I was interested in examining that in particular and in the concept of protection”.  She has Sharon say that the police should be trained to recognize signs of mental illness in criminals.  The problem with this well-meant plea is that in the heat of the moment when a person is committing what legally is a crime there is no time to do a psychological assessment to have that information affect how the person is treated.  Second, psychological assessments are not always straightforward as can be seen in controversies when defendants are assessed to determine whether they are mentally fit to stand trial.  

Given this very fuzzy message and lack of any strong storytelling, what holds our interest in the play is entirely the exceptional performances of the cast.  Of the two families, the relationship of Sharon and Connor comes off as far more realistic that that of Dan and Janie.  Susan Coyne is wonderful in capturing every aspect of mothering that grates on a teenaged male.  Her Sharon is oblivious to the the negative effect that her well-meant expressions of concern have on a son who is trying to be independent.  When he returned to the ignominious state of dependency, Coyne’s mother is again blind to how her attempts at optimism only deepen her son’s depression.  Eventually, after blithely hitting a brick wall innumerable times, she comes to see that books and examples of other people can’t give her any insight into her son’s condition.  The most beautiful moment in the play is when Coyne’s energetic Susan finally gives up and simply accepts the situation for what it is. 

For his part, newcomer Colin Mercer captures exactly the typical annoyances of a teenaged male.  When Mercer speaks of the events Connor experienced at university that drove him away, he lends them such a dark, cryptic tone that we imagine that what happened is far worse than it turns out to be.  Though his Connor is difficult, he is also sympathetic and finding out what really happened to him at university becomes our prime motivation for staying on for Act 2. 

Ian Lake give a solid performance as Dan.  Like Coyne’s Sharon, he tends to counter a depressed person’s negativity with optimism and does not recognize that it’s effect is opposite to what is intended.  Most of the list of subject Janie wants to discuss are ones he does not want mentioned.  Yet, MacLeod seems to think that it’s all right to have a straight-arrow policeman like Dan violate rights of privacy and discuss his cases with his wife.  Despite the contractions in MacLeod’s writing, Lake makes Dan so sympathetic that we can’t really believe Sharon’s accusations against him.  He gives Dan the sense of carrying about the disturbing burden of what he sees everyday, so that we feel that Janie herself, despite her depression, should try to understand his need for privacy and calm at home.

You leave The Valley thinking that it could not be better performed but wondering what it is that MacLeod is getting at.  While MacLeod is interested in how people of various types are all connected, you can’t help thinking that she might better have explored the topic in two related one-act plays – one focussing on mother and son, one on husband and wife – so that she could spend more time focussing on character and less on creating patterns of parallels that lead nowhere.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Susan Coyne and Colin Mercer; Michell Monteith and Ian Lake. ©2013 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit http://tarragontheatre.com.