Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✩✩✩
by John Mighton, directed by Mitchell Cushman
Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford
July 15-September 19, 2015
George: “I’ve been dreaming. I’m in a case”
John Mighton’s Possible Worlds caused quite a stir when it first appeared in 1990. It won the Governor General’s Award for Drama in 1992 and in 2000 it was made into a film by Robert Lepage. People who didn’t know Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists (1962), now playing at Stratford, were excited by Mighton’s mix of murder mystery and theoretical physics. People who didn’t know J.B. Priestley’s series of “Time Plays”, especially his Time and the Conways (1937), were excited by Mighton’s notion of non-linear time. People who didn’t know Borges’ story from 1941 “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) were were excited to see the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics depicted in literature, even though Borges’ story describes the phenomenon before it was scientifically formulated in 1957.
Now, in its first appearance at the Stratford Festival, Mighton’s play does not seem so exciting. In fact it’s rather a disappointing muddle that the direction of Mitchell Cushman does nothing to clarify. It starts out as a murder mystery but the investigation is given up halfway through the action though the answer is obvious. It toys with MWI only to abandon it at the end. As drama it has no characters we care about and no plot to follow. Cushman does his best to conjure up an atmosphere of magic and intrigue but atmosphere alone without real magic and intrigue behind it can’t sustain our interest for 90 minutes.
As we enter the Studio Theatre, we see that the stage has been converted by set designer Anahita Dehbonehie into a shallow pool of water. Lying in the pool are a man’s suit and shoes. As spacey music plays and the lights come up, we see the the naked body of a man (Cyrus Lane) who puts on the wet clothing and sits in the shadows. Police detectives Berkley (Michael Spencer-Davis) and Williams (Gordon S. Miller) wheel in a gurney with a body on it. (Berkley’s name is likely a reference to the philosopher George Berkeley, who believe material existence was a product of the mind.) The body is the latest victim, George Baker, of a serial murderer who as in previous murders has cut off the top of the victim’s head and stolen the brain.
In the following scene we meet George Baker, who is none other than the man lying in the pool when we entered. He is a stock broker who is pursuing a scientist named Joyce (Krystin Pellerin), who shows no interest in him. The next time we see them Joyce is a stockbroker pursuing George, who tells her about his ability to travel between alternate dimensions. We thus assume that this scene between George and Joyce takes place in a different dimension from their previous scene.
Meanwhile, Berkley is interviewing a neuroscientist named Penfield (Sarah Orenstein), who is conducting research on the function of imagination. (Penfield’s name is likely a reference to Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, who investigated neural stimulation of the brain.) To this end Penfield has several brains suspended in liquid and on some sort of life support. A rat brain named Louise can, for example signal that it perceives hunger and Penfield can signal it that it has been fed, thus satisfying the brain’s desire.
Given the restricted number of characters and given that human brains are being stolen and that another character has been acquiring brains (though, she claims, not human ones), the mystery of who have been stealing brains is not really much of a mystery. If it were, Berkley and Williams would conduct a proper inquiry and conduct interviews with people who knew Baker. As it is, Mighton doesn’t present us with Baker’s wife (Pellerin) until very near the end of the action, after the detectives have given up their investigation for supposed lack of leads.
Mighton tries to keep us interested in variations of scenes between George and Joyce, each one being slightly different and thus presumably set in a slightly different dimension. George says outright to Joyce: “Each of us exists in an infinite number of possible worlds. In one world I’m talking to you right now but your arm is a little to the left, in another world you’re interested in that man over there with the glasses, in another you stood me up two days ago”.
Because Mighton occupies so much of the play with George’s version of MWI, it is extremely disappointing that he reveals George’s experience of the multiverse as a delusion. George comes to this realization at the end of the play: “I know where I am now. There’s only one world. I’ve been dreaming. I’m in a case”. What makes the play annoying is that Mighton has spun out his play primarily by tricking the audience.
At the start we know that George Baker is dead, just as we know that screenwriter Joe Gillis is dead and floating in a pool at the start of the film Sunset Boulevard (1950). We assume, following this film noir model that the following scenes with George as alive are flashbacks that will explain how he came to be murdered. Unfortunately, since all of the action is imaginary, George’s experiences are not flashbacks that lead to any explanation. All the scenes between George and the various Joyces thus appear merely as filler. This is because the play is essentially the contemplation of a static situation, a brain entertaining itself in isolation.
If Cushman had wanted to preserve any sense of mystery in the action, he would not have chosen to present the play as he does. A shallow pool of water is an inadequate representation of a glass case filled with liquid, but Cushman’s production already tells us that all the action is happening in the “case” where George finally realizes that his brain is. Cushman’s concept, however, forces the actors to experience enough discomfort that the play is unpleasant to watch. To see Cyrus Lane putting on clothes that are sopping wet and remain in them for 90 minutes makes us think more about his situation as an actor than his role as a character. To see the other actors walk through the pool in their shoes ankle deep in water constantly distracts us from what they say.
Given that there is no character development to interest us, Cushman focusses on making the production itself interesting to the unhappy point of obscuring what little story there is. He has set the action in the near future where people carry about their personal computers in the form of a dongle around their necks. This system turns out not to be very attractive because the only way to display the screen is through projections (designed by Nick Bottomley) arrayed on the ground, forcing the user to work bent over in a chair.
Cushman also has consulted with magician David Ben to help add to the surreal atmosphere through the addition of magic tricks. Lane shows that he can cough up multiple ping pong balls, that he can upend a half-full glass without spilling the contents and that he can keep pouring a red liquid into the pool from a seemingly bottomless jar (known in magic as the “Inexhaustible Bottle”). None of these tricks, no matter how well performed, contribute toward telling the story and frequently distract us from it.
Mighton has given the actors very little to work with since their characters remain static. All Lane can do with George is to give him a generic good humour that begins to cloud over once he realizes his true situation. Pellerin, at least, has the advantage of playing several versions of Joyce, all of which she keeps distinct, particularly the wary scientist Joyce from the outgoing stockbroker Joyce from the British-accented Jocelyn, who is Williams’s holographic intellect-building instructor.
Michael Spencer-Davis and Gordon S. Miller’s detectives are thoroughly uninteresting primarily because Mighton has not scene fit to flesh them out in any way or to give them a wry sense of humour such as Dürrenmatt does with his detectives in The Physicists. Sarah Orenstein gives an iteration of the self-obsessed intellectuals she has been playing recently, though she does get a chance to shine as the loony caretaker of George’s building who believes we are being attacked by UFOs.
John Mighton’s Possible Worlds is a play that sounds much more intriguing in synopsis than it does in performance. There the lack of inherent drama is soporific and no amount of superficial flash, whether in magic tricks or projections, can can cover up this lack. Mighton would later go on to write the superlative play Half Life (2005) that is fully centred on people rather than theory. The 1990s would produce masterpieces combining drama and science in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998). Possible Worlds is simply not in the same league.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Krystin Pellerin and Cyrus Lane; Sarah Orenstein (behind screen) and Cyrus Lane. ©2015 David Hou.
For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.
2015-07-29
Possible Worlds