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by Deirdre Kinahan, directed by Christopher Stanton

Actors Repertory Company, The Grocery, 1362 Queen St. East, Toronto

November 6-22, 2014

“Family Gathering – Gathering Clouds”

Actors Repertory Company is currently presenting the English-language Canadian premiere of Moment, a play from 2009 by Irish playwright Deirdre Kinahan.  The plot of Moment is one of most overused in modern drama – a family member returns home and long-buried secrets are revealed.  What is so remarkable is that she has given this familiar scenario a distinctive twist and made something old seem new again.  Director Christopher Stanton’s insightful, highly detailed staging and the ardent commitment of the entire cast makes Moment an exciting theatrical experience.

A character returned home after an absence is an ancient dramatic plot device that regained popularity in the realistic plays of Henrik Ibsen.  That combined with the family gathering gone awry has been a mainstay of drama for at least a century.  Notable recent examples include David Eldridge’s Festen (2004) and Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County (2007).  Both of these plays are about a big family celebration.  Kinahan’s play is unusual in its emphasis on the mundanity of this family meeting. 

Teresa Lynch (Deborah Drakeford) is simply getting ready for an ordinary tea (light supper) with help from her daughters Ciara (Aviva Armour-Ostroff) and Niamh (Janet Porter).  The daughters are glad to help because Teresa seems distracted and over-excitable.  Simple details about what she should serve and what she should wear seem disproportionately to upset her.  Teresa has prescriptions for antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills, but she also has daughters willing to help her so that Kinahan is at pains to underline that she is not portraying that all-too-common dramatic entity, the dysfunctional family.  The family is functioning and Ciara receives help from her loving husband Dave (Andre Sills).

Despite this, we do note that Niamh does not want her boyfriend and co-worker Fin (Gordon Bolan) to stay to tea.  We assume that Niamh fears her mother will leap to conclusions and become too excited.  More troubling is Teresa’s almost forgotten news, that her son Nial (Ryan Hollyman) will be stopping by and will be bringing a woman with him.  While Ciara takes this in stride, Niamh clearly finds this upsetting and hopes to be absent by the time Nial appears. 

For his part Nial does not want to return home at all.  The idea is that of his newly wedded wife Ruth (Bahareh Yaraghi) who wants to meet Nial’s family, of which she is now part, before she and Nial head off to Spain.  Contrary to both Nial and Niamh’s desires, circumstances force all the characters to gather to share the same tea at the same table.  Niamh cannot disguise her animosity toward Nial and because of her prodding, the secret no one but Niamh wants to discuss finally comes out.  Ruth admits that she knows about Nial’s past.  She knows that is was in prison for fourteen years for committing murder. 

Contrary to most plays about hidden family secrets, Kinahan reveals this secret at the end of the first act.  And herein lies the novelty of her play.  Moment is not about the revelation of the secret as much as it is about how the family deals with the secret once it is out in the open.  Nial committed the murder when he was a boy.  While in prison he developed a talent for art and in the course of his incarceration became a celebrated painter whose primary theme is how people are imprisoned in life in various ways.  He feels he is a different person now than he was when he first went to prison and he wants a fresh start.  He wanted to avoid seeing his family because he feared they would be unable to see him as a different person.

Niamh is the perfect embodiment of that fear.  To her Nial’s freedom, new vocation, new wife, mean nothing.  To her he is still a murderer and she wants him to know that she has been serving a sentence for his deed as much as he has in prison.  To her his deed drove their father to an early death, their mother to a dependency on pills, while it destroyed her youth.  Kinahan’s Act 2 is so fascinating, and so unlike the typical family secret play, because it explores what, if any, kind of compromise can be reached between such opposing points of view.

Moment is an ensemble piece and director Christopher Stanton has chosen a very strong cast who work so well together they feel like a family.  All the performances are characterized by the ability to maintain a facade of calm while conveying a sense of disquiet or worse underneath.  As Teresa, Deborah Drakeford has what would seem to be the most impenetrable façade.  Her character is clearly so over-medicated that she is frequently confused and somnolent.  Her face is often expressionless except for a wan smile.  Despite this, Drakeford is able to show that anger about her condition and anxiety about what is happening still lie close to the surface.  Without warning her inner feelings will break out in the form of shouting that soon subsides or she will suddenly struggle with people trying to sooth her.  Drakeford gives her character an unpredictability that creates a fraught atmosphere even before Nial and Ruth arrive.

Janet Porter captures Niamh’s difficulty with great subtlety.  In the presence of her mother and Ciara and even in the presence of Fin, she gives us the sense of repressing feelings that could too easily escalate into anger.  As the effort of Niamh’s attempts at self-control become more obvious, the more anxious we become about what she will say or do.  In the beautifully staged tea sequence when all the characters are at the table, Porter has Niamh withdraw so far into herself it seems she will implode.  In fact, she explodes, leading to the revelation of Nial’s secret and a disastrous end to the family gathering.

As Nial, Ryan Hollyman gives what may well be his finest performance ever.  Even at his first entrance when no one else is home, his character exudes such discomfort that it taints the already fraught atmosphere.  Before his secret is out, he shows us that Nial is struggling to present himself as a new man in the face of everyone’s knowledge, including his own, of his horrific past.  In the second act Hollyman shows us the two sides of Nial that are at constant war.  One side’s

pleas for forgiveness are heartbreaking.  The other side’s narration of what happened during the murder is chilling.  Hollyman demonstrates how naturally these two sides can coexist.  This is important since part of Kinahan’s point is that none of us really knows what harm we are really capable of in any given moment. 

The play is staged in a large room in a venue called The Grocery at 1362 Queen Street East, although the room is at the back of the building and the entrance is through a gate off Greenwood Avenue.  Designer Jackie Chau has transformed the space to look like a large dine-in kitchen with a huge table, early on seen as a symbol of family, as its central fixture.  Only 30 people are admitted per performance to sit around the room’s four walls, with the actors frequently playing within inches of them.  Moment mostly demands kitchen-sink realism, but Kinahan herself breaks this mould by using a flashback to depict the events that led up to the murder.  This disruption gives Stanton leave to add other non-naturalistic touches to the play.  The symbolism of feathers blown or strewn about the room is not clear until after Nial’s second act narrative about the murder.  To emphasize the central power struggle in the play, Stanton has Niamh and Nial stand on the table facing each other and holding knives as they deliver their lines.  Stanton often uses a sound cue of the roar of wind or water to indicate the emotional tension beneath the placid surface.  For his part, lighting designer Nicholas Blais achieves a surprising range of effects given the nature of the space.         

One might quibble with Stanton’s decision to have the actors use Canadian rather than Irish accents.  References to Dublin and Cork plus vocabulary common to the British Isles do sound unusual in Canadian accents, but the payoff in bringing Kinahan’s story home to us rather than portraying it as alien and therefore dismissible is worth the loss of the Irish lilt.  Ruth’s character is English and would be marked as such by her speech throughout, but Stanton solves this by having Chau dress her in a style far more elegant than that of the other women. 

Moment is a thoughtful, eye-opening take on familiar dramatic material.  Unlike previous examples of the family secret dramas, Kinahan implies that keeping a secret leads to a kind of disease that and only be alleviated by exposing it.  Or, to change metaphors, the action, especially as directed by Stanton, is conceived of as a natural event like a storm that gradually gathers in Act 1 until it explodes, then rages in Act 2 until it dissipates leaving the atmosphere cleansed.  ARC’s production is an excellent introduction to a playwright whose work I now long to see more of. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Janet Porter, Bahareh Yanaghi, Andre Sills, Gordon Bolan, Ryan Holly man and Deborah Drakeford; Ryan Hollyman and Deborah Drakeford. ©2014 Karl Ang.

For tickets, visit www.brownpapertickets.com/event/899552.