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by Sara Farb, directed by Richard Greenblatt

Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto

February 10-March 1, 2015

“Rebecca Times Two”

Sara Farb’s R-E-B-E-C-C-A is an enjoyable tale of two young women sporting the same name for almost all of its 80 minutes.  Then we reach the ending and whatever it is that happens is so incomprehensible that it makes us wonder what the play was supposed to been about in the first place.  It is possible to enjoy the play for Farb’s performance alone as the two Rebeccas.  But it would be better if Farb could leave the audience satisfied, rather than mystified, with her story.

The inspiration for the play is Farb’s younger sister who was born seven weeks prematurely and diagnosed as developmentally delayed at a very young age.  The play begins with a video projected on the back wall of the set of the 18th birthday party of just such a developmentally delayed woman named Rebecca.  She is served a piece of cake with a blue flower on the icing, but creates a fuss when she doesn’t also get a piece with a pink flower.  This causes her to be sent to the “time out stairs” in her family’s house where she begins a complaint against her family for treating her like a baby when she’s a “big girl” now.

Scenes of this Rebecca alternate with scenes of a second Rebecca who is away at camp.  She is filming herself on a rock in the middle of a stream as she awaits the exact time when she will turn 18.  She wants to film this moment because she is prone to depression and is convinced that some catastrophe will intervene that will prevent her from ever reaching 18.  It turns out that this Rebecca’s camp is located right next to the camp for “retards” as this Rebecca calls them.  Eventually, this Rebecca sees the developmentally delayed Rebecca we first met arrive at her camp.  This Rebecca refers to that Rebecca as “Rebecca 2”. 

Therefore, I will adopt the this system and refer to the depressed Rebecca as “Rebecca 1” and the delayed Rebecca as “Rebecca 2”.  During the course of the play, the monologue of Rebecca 2 covers the period of months from the 18th birthday party we witnessed to her first days at camp.  The monologue of Rebecca 1, however, is confined to only the one hour she is filming before her expected demise.

The main problem with Farb’s is that what she thinks she is depicting is not what we experience.  The Theatre Passe Muraille website tells us that “We meet two Rebeccas, one real and one imagined (both performed by Farb) as they prepare to celebrate their respective 18th birthdays.  Although existing in parallel universes, these two Rebeccas manage to find a connection, uniting in an unexpected and powerful way”.  We do not experience the characters as one real and one imagined, but rather see both as real, and nothing in Farb’s text nor in Richard Greenblatt’s direction suggests otherwise.  Since each Rebecca tells us she sees the other Rebecca at camp, we hardly feel they exist in parallel universes, if parallel means having no contact.  In her programme note, Farb says the play represents her “personal musings about what my sister might have been like if she weren’t developmentally delayed”.  All we know from the play is that Rebecca 1 was born at full term in July, though there was worry her mother might have delivered early in May, while Rebecca 2 was born seven weeks premature in May.  But do we experience these two Rebeccas as different versions of the same person?  No.

Given that flaw, Farb explores the world of both Rebeccas with great humour.  The camp counsellor that the cynical Rebecca 1 calls Douchebag Dave is the same camp counsellor with whom Rebecca 2 is hopelessly in love.  Unconscious of the pathos of the situation, Rebecca 2 tells us that she always tells Dave, “I love you” and then, because he forgets, she says, “I love you too” for him.

While going away to camp is the highlight of Rebecca 2’s year, it is just another painful period to get through for Rebecca 1.  She hates all the young women at camp, especially the ever-perky counsellor “Saint” Katie.  Based on her only hobby, playing the online game World of Warcraft, she refers to all the other girls as “Succubi” (female demons) and to the “retards” as “Troggs” (grotesquely shaped Neanderthal-like creatures who were the result if an experiment gone wrong to create life out of stone).  Rebecca 1 likes the Troggs not in spite of but because of their “grotesque” appearance.  She likes the fact that they cannot

always control themselves and always are what they are.  It’s the hypocrisy of Katie, Dave and the Succubi she can’t stand.

As for herself, Rebecca 1 doesn’t know why she was born.  She hates the psychiatrists she has been sent to visit and hates the “zombie drugs” they give her to control her depression.  While Rebecca 2 wears bandages as a decorations, Rebecca 1 wears them to hide the injuries made from self-harming.  She hurts herself in a variety of ways simply to feel something since she otherwise feels nothing. 

One frustration with the play is that while we feel we get to know Rebecca 2 quite well, we feel we hardly know Rebecca 1 at all despite all her talk.  Why exactly is she depressed?  Is there anything that triggers episodes of depression, or is she always at the same level of depression?  Does she have the usual loop of repeating thoughts and, if so, what are they?  She has been made a counsellor, too, as part of her therapy in hopes that having responsibility will give her a sense of purpose.  Apparently, that plan is not working.  Doesn’t anyone notice this? 

Farb distinguishes the two Rebeccas very well in voice, speech pattern and gesture.  The greatest boon she gives us is to make us see Rebecca 2 as a person and to reveal the variety of feelings and moods she has.  Farb conveys the joylessness of Rebecca 1’s wicked humour, but what she misses is how depressed teens also turn that hypercritical attitude back on themselves.  Rebecca 1 presents her self-harm as a positive and the drugs given to suppress it as a negative, but Farb never moves to the next level of allowing Rebecca 1 some insight into her own condition.  All we get is her sense of superiority to everyone else, except the Troggs.

In her programme note, Farb states, “This play, at its core, is about the fragility of our individual fates: how something on a microscopic level can define a person’s entire existence”.  The trouble is that this is far too general a subject.  After all, male and female is determined at a chromosomal level, and humans share 96% of their DNA with chimpanzees.  Farb suggests that Rebecca 2’s birth seven weeks premature has made her developmentally delayed.  In fact, the truth is not as black-and-white.  Being born prematurely means only that an infant is more at risk for developmental problems than a full-term baby but prematurity does not necessarily condemn an infant to these problems. 

The value of R-E-B-E-C-C-A lies in giving an audience a chance to get to know a character like Rebecca 2, the kind of character who rarely appears in plays.  Rebecca 1 is so realistic, she will remind theatregoers of teens they know though oddly she will not generate much sympathy.  Why these two characters appear on stage together and why their fates are intertwined may not be clear, but Farb and Greenblatt deserve credit for bringing them so vividly to life.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: Sara Farb as Rebecca 2; Sara Farb as Rebecca 1. ©2015 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit http://passemuraille.ca.