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written and translated by Maria Milisavljevic, directed by Richard Rose

Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto

February 11-March 15, 2015

“A Triangle with One Corner Missing”

The Tarragon Theatre is currently presenting the English-language premiere of

Abyss, a play by young German playwright Maria Milisavljevic. The play is written in a style of minimalist narrative drama that first became popular in Germany but has since spread to Britain. The Golden Dragon (2009) by the German Roland Schimmelpfennig seen at the Tarragon in 2012 is one example. Lungs (2011) by Briton Duncan Macmillan seen there in 2014 is another.  In Abyss, as in these two examples, a complex story is told in a short amount of time with lightning-quick switches between narration and dialogue.  As directed by Richard Rose, Abyss is a tour de force for its trio of actors who enact a disturbing story of love, loss and obsession.

The single actor assigned the role of narrator is Cara Pifko, whose character is

labelled only as “I” in the dramatis personae.  The other two are “HE” played by

Gord Rand and “SHE” played by Sarah Sherman.  Within the story the first-person narrator is never named.  She is the sister of Sofia (Sherman) and the former lover, now friend and roommate, of Vlado (Rand).  All three come from the former Yugoslavia and now live in Berlin.  As the action begins, Karla, Vlado's girlfriend for the past four year, has just gone out to the corner store to get cheese for the pizza that she, Vlado and the Narrator are planning to have for dinner.  She doesn't return. Indeed, she never returns.

Since the police are completely indifferent to the case of a young woman who

has gone missing, Vlado, Sofia and the Narrator take on the task of finding Karla themselves. The play quickly turns into a mystery story with the Narrator giving us a day by day account of the actions these three plus the Narrator’s boyfriend Jan (Rand) take in their search.  One clue they struggle to understand is why before she left Karla drew only one heart on the red rain boots she was wearing. When Karla, Vlado and the Narrator were happiest on vacation on a beach in Croatia, as shown in flashbacks, Karla had drawn three hearts on her flip-flops.  The pink slippers she left at Vlado and the Narrator’s apartment also have three hearts drawn on them.

After Jan sets up a website about the missing Karla, a message arrives from someone who saw a man carrying the bag that Karla had been carrying when she left for the store. This lead takes the three into the Russian quarter of the city, a no-go zone for the police, where after a series of visits they finally encounter the man who had the bag. When Vlado refuses to turn the man in to the police, Sofia and the Narrator’s suspicions begin to turn against Vlado and an already frightening tale becomes even scarier.

The initial meaning of "abyss" is the depth below the waves that Karla, Vlado and the Narrator were swimming in off the beach in Croatia. Gradually, we see that the loss of Karla has itself created an abyss in the lives of all who know her.  When the police conclude their investigation, Vlado and the Narrator are not told the outcome so that the abyss becomes a mystery that is never illuminated that the friends will have to live with forever.

The play’s original title is Brandung, a difficult word to translate since it means both “surf” and “the swell of waves”.  It comes from the poem Nis Randers (1901) by Otto Ernst about a man who rescues a young man from a shipwreck only to discover it is his long lost brother that he had thought dead.  Vlado compulsively recites the poem to himself:

    Ein Schrei, durch die Brandung.

    Und brennt der Himmel, so sieht man’s gut.

    Ein Wrack auf der Sandbank, noch wiegt es die Flut.

    Gleich holt sich’s der Abgrund.

    A scream through the swelling waves.

    And when the sky burns, you can see quite clearly:
    A shipwreck on a sandbar, still the sea rocks it.
    Soon it will sink into the abyss.   (My translation)

Ernst’s ballad with its heroism and happy ending stands in complete contrast to the narrative of Milisavljevic’s play.  When the playwright came to translate her play into English, she chose to emphasize the unsounded depths (Abgrund) that lie below her protagonists rather than the confusing flow of events (Brandung) that makes up their lives.  Who is responsible for Karla's disappearance?  Rather as in J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls (1945), the trio discover to their discomfort that all who knew Karla were in some way to blame.

Milisavljevic interrupts the rapid flow of the narration/dialogue of the play with step by step instructions given by Sherman about how to kill, skin and cook a rabbit.  While these disruptions certainly add to the atmosphere of menace that

characterizes the play, especially since Vlado is known for the knife he always

carries, they don't contribute to the forward movement of the story. The one

connection these instructions have is to the feeling of sudden and irrevocable

loss.  The Narrator tells us that when she was little she had a favourite rabbit named Grey. One day when she came home she learned that her grandfather

had killed Grey. He had saved only the rabbit's tail that he put on a string for

the Narrator to remind her of the rabbit. The rabbit's tail thus is to the Narrator as are the pink slippers that Karla had left behind, a token of an unrecoverable absence. Yet, despite the instructions’ link to the theme of the play, they are disruptions the play could quite easily do without.

Looking at pictures of the original production in Berlin in 2013 makes it clear that Rose has decided to give the play a staging that outdoes the original in minimalism.  The original emphasized the imagery of ice that covers over the river into which Karla may have fallen.  It also included a man dressed as a mermaid who provided live music. 

Rose’s concept avoid’s any such distractions.  Jason Hand’s set is simply a black square platform raised about three feet off the ground.  The legs and back drapes are also black. Costume designer Michelle Bailey has clad the three actors in far more casual everyday wear than was the case in the Berlin production. The primary key to mood and sense of place and time of day is Hand's remarkable lighting that is intimately synchronized with key words in the text.

The most unusual feature of the staging is that the three actors hold hands

To say that the three actors work together as an ensemble is to understate how

perfectly coordinated their every word, movement and gesture is. The three literally work as one throughout the entire piece.  Cara Pifko beautifully traces with her voice the Narrator’s rising concern as it turns to fear, suspicion, frustration and resignation.  Gord Rand clearly distinguishes the two men in the Narrator’s life.  His Vlado is secretive, obsessive and still plagued by memories from the war in Bosnia, where his mother died.  His screams during these memories are blood-chilling.  Jan, however, is friendly and outgoing, making Vlado’s dislike of him all the more strange.

Sarah Sherman plays the widest range of roles from the neutral voice of the rabbit killing manual to the Narrator’s sister who is the first one to suspect Vlado.  She also plays Karla’s mother; Varvara, a woman in the Russian Quarter who saw the man with Karla’s bag; and Göran, a derelict in the Russian Quarter who is also the eyes and ears of the area.  Sherman’s ability to transform herself instantly from role to role is startlingly effective.

Abyss presents a mystery that does not provide a tidy ending.  That is because it is more like life than Agatha Christie.  Nevertheless, some people may feel frustration in not seeing exactly how the past experience of the Narrator and Vlado in the former Yugoslavia fits in with the narrative about Karla’s disappearance.  Vlado’s unexplained hold over the Narrator, summed up in their pledge “Loyalty to the King!” is another mystery that is never fully explained.  Others will find that through these references Milisavljevic expands the crime story of a missing person to become a meditation on what binds people to each other and to their origins and on the many ways that people, even when present, can go “missing”.  All in all, Abyss is a powerful and disturbing play given a taut, imaginative production.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: Cara Pifko, Sarah Sherman and Gord Rand; Cara Pifko and Gord Rand. ©2015 Cylla von Tiedemann.

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