Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✩✩✩
by George F. Walker, directed by Andrea Wasserman
Hart House Theatre, Toronto
September 18-October 3, 2015
“One Wedding and a Mess of Funerals”
Hart House Theatre must have been delighted to snag the world premiere of a play by George F. Walker. The premise involving the aftereffects of a marriage between culturally divergent families sounds promising. In reality, however, We the Family turns out to lie at one of the lower levels in Walker’s recent creative trough. It seems to be merely a collage of scenes and themes from his previous plays, sliced and diced and haphazardly glued together. The characters are stereotypes, the plot has so many holes it can hardly be called a plot and the action does not lead to a conclusion but simply stops. The cast and creative team give the piece the best production possible, but Walker has given them nothing of substance to work with.
Nominally, the plot concerns the events that happen after the wedding of the son of David and Lizzie Kaplan (John Clelland and Sarah Murphy-Dyson) with the step-daughter of Jenny Lee (Phoebe Hu). Walker seems to think the notion of a Chinese-Jewish wedding is hilarious in itself. Having actually attended a lovely Chinese-Jewish wedding myself, I can affirm that there is nothing at all to ridicule about such an event.
Contrary to what publicity for the play might lead one to believe, Walker does nothing to explore the difficulties of the two families in getting along after the wedding. He seems completely uninterested in their cultural differences. David, repeatedly referred to as an “ex-Jew”, and Lizzie get along with Jenny just fine. Instead, Walker falls back on the one thing he is always interested in – money. After the suicide of her husband, Jenny finds she is unable to pay all the debts he left and turns to the Kaplans for help. Lizzie is sympathetic and, as one might predict from any of Walker’s other plays, David, being a wealthy, high-powered businessman, is not.
Any idea of a clash of cultures Walker compresses into the role of Merle, (Connie Guccione), David’s mother. Walker uses her as a mouthpiece for politically incorrect rants about anyone who is Jewish, Irish, Chinese or Arab. The excuse Walker gives in the play is that Merle has a brain tumour that has caused her behaviour to change, to become more Jewish and unable to censor her speech. In performance, the functionless character, who does nothing to move the story forward, seems more like an excuse for Walker to load the play with as many offensive cultural remarks as possible.
Following a longstanding trope in Walker’s plays, David Kaplan, since he is a wealthy businessman, is simply a gangster that society finds acceptable. Therefore, as usual, the businessman has connections with the criminal underworld. Kaplan has them both through his Irish ex-con father Sonny (David Cairns) and through his Russian mistress Sonya (Jessica Allen).
While David has given in to temptation, Lizzie has not. Ali (Mike Vitorovich), a hot Palestinian teacher at her school, would like to start a relationship, but she keeps putting him off. A recovering alcoholic, she relies for advice and medication, quite improbably, from her “psychiatrist” Bianca (Renée Haché), who dresses like a hooker, has no office and supplies Lizzie with pills directly from her purse.
The Kaplans and Jenny Lee both have teenaged daughters – Marnie (Lindsey Middleton) and Lucy (Sherman Tsang) – who, of course, feel alienated from their parents. Given her parents, Marnie has real justification to feel so; given her sympathetic stepmother and the loss of her father, Lucy’s anger is not fully understandable.
Among the play’s many flaws is the fact that the onstage action is determined so greatly by events that occur offstage. Throughout the play we are given updates on the (never seen) newlyweds round-the-world honeymoon journey and the problems they encounter. All this reported action, which eventually becomes too complicated to follow, dictates what the main characters do on stage. This fact makes Walker’s characters, who are already nothing more than a collection of stereotypes, seem merely like puppets.
In We the Family Walker does experiment with a new stage technique in having such a large amount of the dialogue occur as cellphone conversations. This may reflect the way many people do communicate nowadays, but it has a negative effect on stage. Conversations mediated by a device will never have the same impact as face-to-face encounters. People use computers all the time, but filmmakers have yet to figure out how to make computer use interesting on film. Walker’s play suggests the same is true about cellphone conversations on stage.
Director Andrea Wasserman has drawn energetic performances from the entire cast within the bounds of what Walker has written. John Clelland’s David is clearly self-obsessed and oddly detached from everyone but gives no hint of the icy villain that he will become. Sarah Murphy-Dyson’s high-strung schoolteacher is not all that different from her high-strung school principal in Walker’s Parents Night and The Bigger Issue just earlier this year. In both cases the fault is Walker’s inadequate characterization, not the actor’s abilities.
Connie Guccione and David Cairns are both very funny as David’s parents. Guccione delivers her outrageous diatribes with vigour and Cairns is one of the few in the cast to turn his stereotype, the shifty ex-con, into an interesting character. Phoebe Hu makes Jenny Lee such a warm figure, a relief in a Walker play, that we wish Walker would let us get to know her better.
Sherman Tsang as the rebellious teen, Jessica Allen as the sultry Russian prostitute, and Mike Vitorovich as the randy schoolteacher all remain trapped in their stereotypes, while Renée Haché saucily approaches her bizarre role of Bianca the only way she can by pretending it makes sense even if it doesn’t. Besides David Cairns’s Sonny and Phoebe Hu’s Jenny, the only character who seems remotely like a real human being is Lindsey Middleton’s Marnie. As with Sonny and Jenny, Marnie is a potentially intriguing character that Walker simply fails to explore.
Wasserman keeps the pace snappy and the performances punchy. Brandon Kleiman has designed a very clever set that can change into the numerous interior and exterior locations in downtown Toronto that Walker demands. David DeGrow’s lighting is key to shifting our focus from place to place. Kathleen Black’s costumes are all appropriate to the characters and especially witty as concerns the tarty Bianca.
We the Family is thus for rabid Walker fans only, though they are more likely than most to see how much the show is just so much recycled material. Given the obvious talent of the cast and creative team, it’s a real pity Walker couldn’t have created a more worthwhile play for them to present.
©Christopher Hoile
Comment from George F. Walker, September 21, 2015, at 10:09 am:
What the fuck are you doing reviewing plays at Hart House? And it's so long. So many flaws to point out. Kind of obsessive really. Would you swim the Atlantic to take a shot at me? It's getting tiresome.
In the way a persistent fly does. No more. Hey! Why don't I just send you a list of my scheduled productions around the world this year? That should keep you busy.
You've made your point. You don't like the work. So what? You think that affects the size of my audience? They still come. But I guess that must drive you a bit batty. Why not spend your time more productively. You'll be a healthier person, trust me.
You have zero impact on who comes to my plays. I've been around too long. Sorry. The damage is done.
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Sherman Tsang, Phoebe Hu, Sarah Murphy-Dyson, John Cleland and Lindsey Middleton; Connie Guccione, Mike Vitorovich and Sarah Murphy-Dyson. ©2015 Scott Gorman.
2015-09-20
We the Family