Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by Michael Ripley
Theatre Rattlebag, Red Sandcastle Theatre, Toronto
February 25-March 2, 2014
Frank: “So… even when I’m nice you want to blind me?”
Michael Ripley’s latest play, Letters to Saint Rita, is only 65 minutes long, but it has an unusual structure, an intentionally jarring mix of tones and a surprisingly complex theme. If it doesn’t quite work it is partially because of the production and partially because of the variable level of the writing. The conclusion that Ripley works toward is fascinating and one wishes that the entire play had been imbued with the strength of that final scene.
The action is divided into four scenes that are not presented in chronological order. We start with the breakup of the marriage between unhappy housewife and mother Sonja (Nicole Maroon) and her husband Frank (Stephen Jackson), an academic who fails to understand his wife’s anger at her situation. The second scene shows how Frank and Sonja met. She was the doctoral student of Frank’s brother Brian, who has been kicked out of the university for plagiarism. The third scene presents a glimpse of Sonja and Frank’s marriage at its happiest, with Frank fully at ease with the fact that Sonja is pregnant with Brian’s baby. The final scene takes place long after the marriage breakup in the waiting room for a hospital’s emergency ward where the baby, now a seven-year-old, is undergoing surgery after a car accident.
Ripley has chosen this unusual structure to sandwich two scenes of comedy between two scenes of tragedy. His goal is clearly to capture the wide range of emotions that any relationship undergoes. By beginning with the breakup of a relationship, as Pinter does in his reverse chronological play Betrayal (1978), Ripley give the two following comic scenes a sense of irony since we are already aware the couple’s happiness will not last. As in Betrayal, this makes us look for the fault-lines in the relationship that will cause it to split apart later. Unfortunately, Ripley is so keen on emphasizing the comedy of the middle two scenes that we don’t perceive any potential fault lines beneath the couple’s façade of happiness. We look for but don’t see any part of Frank who regards the coming baby as hers not his. We look for but don’t see any part of Sonja who views her coming motherhood as a burden that will halt her academic career. It is only in the final scene, where the two reflect on the past, with perhaps more self-awareness than they have previously demonstrated, that the tensions that existed between them become fully apparent.
One clever aspect of the play’s design is that all four scenes are centred on the receipt of a letter – one with good news and one with bad, one each for Frank and one each for Sonja. These are “letters to Saint Rita” only in a highly metaphorical sense. Saint Rita of Cascia (1381-1457) is venerated as a model wife and mother and is the patron saint of difficult marriages and impossible cases. The saint is never mentioned in the play and the only reference to her appears in Sonja’s wound on her forehead in the last scene which recalls the partial stigmata Rita received while meditating on an image of the crucified Christ. To link only Sonja to Saint Rita rather confuses the theme since both Sonja and Frank receive letters. Since these letter affect decisions they make about their relationship, a more accurate title for the play might be “Letters for Saint Rita”, since each letter poses a problem or an opportunity and how to react to each would be a case that prayer to Saint Rita might help solve.
Nicole Maroon gives a highly effective, emotionally charged performance as Sonja, no matter what her character’s state of mind. The depth of her commitment to the role and the nuance she brings to it are the production’s strongest features. Stephen Jackson, in contrast, seems most comfortable with the comic side of Frank that he brings out with real panache. In Frank’s first scene he doesn’t seem to put enough force behind Frank’s words. In Frank’s final scene, however, he does rise to the challenge of portraying a deeply humbled man who seeks forgiveness.
Trying to depict the extremes of a relation plus raising the philosophical question whether free will or fate plays the greater part in a relationship’s success is quite a lot for a playwright to tackle in such a short play. It’s exciting to find a playwright like Ripley, who clearly does not shy away from big questions nor from unconventional dramatic structures to embody them. Letters to Saint Rita makes me look forward to seeing more of his work.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Nicole Maroon and Stephen Jackson. ©2014 Theatre Rattlebag.
For tickets, visit http://redsandcastletheatre.com..
2014-02-26
Letters to Saint Rita