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by Will Eno, directed by Richard Rose

Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

November 16-December 18, 2016

John Jones: “Words don’t do it for me anymore”

Will Eno’s brilliant play The Realistic Joneses may have run on Broadway but it is nothing like a Broadway play.  It does not deal with current events, identity politics or the “American Dream”.  It may be set in the US in the present and its settings of a back porch and a kitchen make make it seem ordinary enough.  But Eno’s prime inspiration is Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd not Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller.  There is no plot, no family secret to uncover.  Rather, Eno’s main topics are language and the nature of existence.  Beckett may have had his tramps in Waiting for Godot (1953) and Endgame (1957).  Eno’s characters may wear ordinary modern clothes, but in Eno’s eyes, we, despite our relative wealth and modern conveniences, are no different than Beckett’s tramps tragicomically hoping for meaning and finding none.

In previous plays by Eno that Toronto has seen – like Thom Pain (based on nothing) in 2006 and Title and Deed in 2015 – Eno presented us with plays in which a single speaker encountered immense difficulties in telling a simple story.  Thom Pain simply wants to tell us two stories about his life, but he is so self-conscious of every word he says he spends more time in explaining why he speaks than he does than in telling his stories.  The anonymous Man of Title and Deed is a “slightly foreign man” from an unknown English-speaking country who tries to explain what it is like to be a foreigner.  However, he does not get very far since he is completely unsure about the basic facts he and his audience share.  In Thom Pain Eno shows us a man who no longer trusts language as an adequate medium of communication.  In Title and Deed he shows us a man who doubts there is any common human nature that people share. 

Both these themes dominate The Realistic Joneses written in 2012, the same year as Title and Deed.  The first scene sets the tone for everything that follows.  We meet Jennifer and Bob Jones (Susan Coyne and Tom Barnett) who are sitting outside their small house in the country enjoying the fine weather.  The topic of their conversation is whether or not to have a conservation and whether they are or are not already having one.  Already Eno has the characters’ self-consciousness call into question the the function of language and the possibility of people actually communicating.  Jennifer feels they are not really having a conversation: “We’re – I don’t know – sort of throwing words at each other”.  As we soon realize the play consists almost more of “word throwing” than it does of communicating.

Bob seems uneasy and distant as if if in pain.  We eventually learn he is suffering from a (fictional) degenerative neurological disease called Harrison-Levy Syndrome.  Its abbreviation HLS will many people think of another degenerative disease ALS, but ALS is a motor neuron disease, whereas Eno’s HLS is very like Wilson’s Disease caused by copper build-up in the body that leads to difficulty in speaking, seeing and hearing and leads to personality changes and eventually death.  The tension we notice between Jennifer and Bob is that of a depressed man increasingly unsure of the point of living and his wife living with the stress of being forced to become a caregiver to a difficult patient. 

The Realistic Joneses is, however, not a play about disease and caregiving or Eno would have given Bob’s disease a real name.  It really is about degeneration and dying to which everyone is subject and whether those still able see it as their duty or not to help those less able.

Bursting into the fraught world of Jennifer and Bob come their new neighbours Pony and John Jones (Jenny Young and Patrick McManus).  The identical last name reflects both their ordinariness and, as we soon discover, their similarity to the other Joneses.  According to Eno’s script the new Joneses are a bit younger than the other Joneses.  They are more buoyant and prone to joking than the other, more sombre Joneses, whose relationship has soured because of the inescapability of Bob’s disease.  Their giddiness, however, is only the product of their recent move and having escaped the city. 

In fact, unbeknownst to Pony, John chose to move to the same town as the other Joneses because he also has HLS and wants to be treated by the world expert in the disease who lives in the town and happens also to be Bob’s doctor.  Both Pony and Jennifer comment in the play about seeing a man called Elliott who is in the last stages of HLS.  Thus Eno sets up a sequence of degeneration similar to that in Endgame where Becket show us the mobile Clove, the wheelchair-bound Ham and Ham’s parents, Nagg and Nell, who live in trash cans.  Eno gives us John in the first stages of the disease and a wife just beginning to realize what is happening to him, Bob in the middle stages of the disease and a wife who is fighting the frustration of caring for him and the unseen Elliott and his wife Hannah who is close to seeing her husband’s disease to its fatal conclusion. 

The tensions that spring up between the characters all ultimately relate to their perception of their proximity to death or their attempts to deny that awareness.  John is aggressive towards Jennifer because she is such a dedicated caregiver to Bob, whereas he fears Pony, who freaks out at the sight of a dead squirrel will be useless dealing with his condition.  John is aggressive toward Bob because he represents a future self doesn’t want to think about.  Meanwhile, Bob is attracted to Pony because she still does not know what care is, while Jennifer is attracted to John because she can see that he needs the care she can provide. 

Eno communicates all this through accurately and humorously reflecting the semi-incoherent way in which many people speak through non sequiturs, self-interruptions, unfortunate turns of phrase, unfinished thoughts and the like.  Rather than criticize each other’s attitudes, the characters criticize their use of language.  In the end, language, as in Eno’s other plays, comically and tragically is revealed as an inadequate means of expressing the depth of existential dread from which all his characters suffer.  As John tells Bob, “Words don’t do it for me anymore”.

Under Richard Rose’s direction all four actors give exemplary performances, each one alive to the depths of subtext that lie beneath their often inane discussions.  Tom Barnett’s Bob begins in a cynical, hostile frame of mind, but Bob is subject to unpredictable changes of mood, and Barnett shows us that when Bob is on a high he speaks and even looks like a completely different person.  Susan Coyne is expert and conveying the myriad of conflicting emotions that roil beneath a surface that she struggles to keep as placid as possible.  Jennifer loves Bob but caring for him is wearing her down and his inability realize what she is sacrificing for his sake drives her mad.  Yet, Jennifer knows that expressing negative feelings to a man whose brain is degenerating has no purpose.  Coyne shows that sometimes Jennifer can’t help but burst out in anger even though she immediately regrets it.

Patrick McManus’s John begins with an inherently jollier personality than Bob’s which is why it may seem even more disturbing that his is losing his grip on language and control over his moods,  Beside this, John is intentionally trying to hide his condition from Pony since he fears she will leave him out of distress.  McManus shows us what seems to be John’s erratic personality but at the same time intimates that painful causes underlie it.  Jenny Young’s Pony has probably the least depth of any of the characters.  Pony’s squeamishness and low threshold for dealing with anything serious make her seem completely unsuited to the world of the play.  Yet, Young suggests that Pony may seem giddy and foolish simply because she has never had to face a real test of courage before.

Charlotte Dean’s elegant set uses a revolve with the Bob Jones’s back yard on one side and the John Jones’s kitchen on the other.  Not only does this make switching from scene to scene easy, but it reinforces the notion in the play that the younger Joneses are really the flip side of the older Jonses.  Eventually, the younger Joneses too will, like the older Joneses, want to leave the confines of their house and seek solace in the immensity of the starlit night.  Sound designer Thomas Ryder Payne creates uncanny effects that seem so real you look to see the source of the noise.  Graeme S. Thomson beautifully stages a virtuoso scene between Bob and John involving an outdoor light with a motion detector that suddenly illuminates the two and then plunges them into darkness, a mordantly comic symbol for the ephemeral nature of existence.

It’s possible that some people will find The Realistic Jonses just too elusive just as the first audience viewed the first production of Waiting for Godot.  Eno obeys none of the conventional rules of exposition or plot development of realistic drama.  His play stems from the emblematic tradition of plays like Beckett’s which presents a situation whose rules we as audience must strive to understand.  People may see disease and caregiving as ideas to hold onto during the action, but to understand the play fully it is necessary to note how much attention Eno pays to language.  As with Beckett, Eno shows the terror that fills people when language begins to lose its purpose and meaning in the face of mental decline and termination of existence.

                        

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Jenny Young, Patrick McManus, Tom Barnett and Susan Coyne; Patrick McManus and Tom Barnett. ©2016 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.