Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✭✭✩
by Ashlin Halfnight, directed by Christopher Stanton
Small Elephant Co-op, Jam Factory Co., Toronto
March 1-23, 2013
“The idea is that the caves shall connect.” Virginia Woolf, Diary 2
Small Elephant Co-op is currently giving Laws of Motion its Canadian premiere. The play was to have closed on March 15 but it has been extended by popular demand to March 23. Anyone interested in a challenging contemporary play, impeccably acted and directed should take advantage of this extension and seek it out without delay. It’s playing in a pleasant new performance space above the Merchants of Green Coffee Company on 2 Matilda Street east of the Don Valley. The playwright, sporting the fanciful name of Ashlin Halfnight, was born in England, raised in Toronto, and after a stint playing professional hockey, now lives in New York. When the play premiered in New York in 2011, critic Martin Denton wrote for nytheatre.com, “Laws of Motion is a splendid new drama that ranks with the very best of Halfnight's work (which is to say, also, with the very best American plays of this new century)”. Not having seen Halfnight’s work before I can’t make such a sweeping statement as Denton, but I can say that if you like the plays of Stephen Adly Guirgis, you will certainly like Laws of Motion.
The play follows the lives of four troubled couples living in New York who are all connected in some way with a person who committed suicide by jumping in front of an oncoming subway train. Two of the stories lead up to the time of the suicide. Two start from the time of the suicide and move forward. Halfnight swiftly shifts focus from couple to couple throughout the play. With eight actors playing twelve characters this could all become quite confusing, but it is greatly to the credit of director Christopher Stanton and his superb cast that the four separate stories are all perfectly clear.
The first couple we meet is Carlo (Carlos Diaz) a subway train driver who is separated from his wife Lonnie (Caitlin Driscoll) with whom he argues about the bad impression he makes by being seen with another woman.
Next we meet Christopher (David Tompa) and Anna (also Caitlin Driscoll) whose subway train is late. Each tries to give the other a grander impression of what they do than is the case. Christopher is a writer and says he is “in publishing” when, in fact, he works for Kinko’s. Anna claims she is an “internet consultant” which she finally admits means only that she often consults the internet. They get even more time to know each other when the train they’re in is stopped because of “police activity”, code in the Metro Transportation Authority for a jumper.
The focus then shifts to the yuppie couple of Markus (Jeff Irving) and Bella (Kate Ziegler) Both are struggling with guilt and loss after the death of their child in a car accident when Markus was the driver. Bella has fallen into depression and Markus can’t concentrate at work and doesn’t know how to deal with his or Bella’s state of mind.
The cousins Jolene (Dani Kind) and Dominik (Pater Pasyk) makes up the fourth couple. Jolene rushes in drunk and immediately demands that Dominik give her some coke. It transpires that that she has just had a terrible experience and is trying to numb herself as much as possible. From various contexts and comments such as “There was nothing you could do”, it seems clear that Jolene has witnessed the jumper incident that stopped the train Christopher and Anna were riding.
Halfnight has constructed the play with almost mathematical symmetry in giving each of the four couples one adjunct person who becomes a source of dispute. For Carlo and Lonnie it is there daughter Sammy (Ewa Wolniczek). Upset that her father has been seen with another woman, Sammy has reportedly been praying in church for God to strike him down. For Christopher and Anna, whose story provides a comic parallel to the distressing stories of the other three, the irritant is the perpetually irate Gordon (Peter Pasyk again), a customer at Kinko’s never satisfied with the service. For Markus and Bella, a negative outside influence comes from Cooper (David Tompa again), who warns Markus that he bringing nothing to the table at the company. For Jolene and Dominik the source of contention becomes Caylee, otherwise known as “Mistress Fiona”, a dominatrix from whom Jolene seeks “treatment” literally to whip the selfishness and obsessiveness out of her.
The point of the play is that all twelve of the characters see themselves as isolated or in some way alienated from those nearest to them. Contradicting this, however, the structure of the play and its central metaphor of the subway system emphasizes the fact that everyone is connected to everyone else in some way. The path to greater happiness is to realize this fact. The comic parallel plot of Christopher and Anna makes this clear. Both initially feel doomed to loneluness and create façades to conceal the fact. Yet, the two come together when they let these façades drop. Anna accepts Christopher’s physical handicap while Christopher has to see if he can accept Anna’s real profession. As for Christopher’s irritant at Kinko’s, he knocks the fight out of him not with argument but with kindness and generosity.
If one believes that Halfnight’s play is based in some way on Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion (“To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction”) propounded in 1687, the Christopher-Anna plot is clearly the positive reaction caused by the negative reaction of the jumper incident. Though the play gives the impression of haphazard organization, it is in fact so tightly structured and provides so much food for thought that I’m certain enough reflection would reveal how Halfnight uses Newton’s First and Second Laws of Motion as well.
Laws of Motion is truly an ensemble work and it always unfair to single out performances when, as in this case, they all have attained such a high level and work in concert so beautifully. Nevertheless, I have to say that Jeff Irving’s performance was extraordinarily good. He shows from the beginning an inherent weakness in Markus, who deterioration he depicts in excruciating detail until the end. Tompa and Driscoll are an absolute delight as the comic couple who can hardly bring themselves to believe that they may really have found love. Dani Kind gives an emotionally wrenching performance as Jolene, a wealthy egotist, we might normally care little for until we see how intensely she is suffering. Kate Ziegler so successfully differentiates the depressive Bella from the aggressive Caylee that I thought the roles were played by different actors.
About her novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, “I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters . . . The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment”. Halfnight has morphed this insight into his central image of the New York subway. Designer Lindsay Anne Black has had the brilliant idea, supported by Sandra Marcroft’s light and Lyon Smith sound design, of setting the entire action with a subway station cleverly created with minimal means in the space separating the two halves of the audience in an alley configuration. Though few of the scenes actually take place in the subway, those that do echo through the play and the set design keeps this ever forward in our minds as a place both of disaster and connection.
We owe the Small Elephant Co-op a major debt of gratitude for staging this play in Toronto and doing so in such an imaginative, exquisitely acted production. The show only whets one’s appetite to see more plays by Halfnight and to see more from all the dedicated members of the co-op involved in this production.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (top row) Peter Pasyk, Ewa Wolniczek, Jeff Irving, Dani Kind; (bottom row) Caitlin Driscoll, David Tompa, Kate Ziegler, Carlos Diaz. ©2013 Small Elephant Co-op.
For tickets, visit www.lawsofmotion.ca.
2013-03-17
Laws of Motion