Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✭✩
by Mark Crawford, directed by Ann Hodges
Blyth Festival, Memorial Hall, Blyth
June 24-August 6, 2016
Another Hit Comedy by Mark Crawford at Blyth
In 2014 the Blyth Festival unveiled the comedy Stag and Doe by Mark Crawford that has gone on so far to have seven more productions. Now Crawford has done it again with his new play The Birds and the Bees which will surely find at least as much success across Canada as Stag and Doe. The play starts out in a mode very like a French farce, except that in a farce we don’t sympathize with the characters whereas in Crawford’s play we do. Also, in a farce our attention is focussed entirely on the here and now whereas Crawford’s play becomes increasingly more reflective in its second act and seeks to console rather than castigate its characters for the confusion they feel.
The action of The Birds and the Bees concerns all the connotations of that phrase, but it also happens to refer to the professions of a daughter and her mother. 38-year-old Sarah (Marion Day), a turkey farmer, has left her husband of eleven years to come back to live with her mother Gail (Nora McLellan) just until she manages to sort out her life. Though Sarah doesn’t want to talk about what has happened or why, Gail manages to pry out of her that Sarah’s husband has almost no interest in having sex. Sarah is faced with the not so comic irony that she spends her days artificially inseminating turkeys while no action at all is happening in her bedroom.
Meanwhile, Gail has been having her own problems. She has been divorced for more than twenty years ever since her husband ran off with the wife of her tenant farmer Earl (John Dolan). Earl’s crops have been failing and Gail’s beekeeping business has suffered a blow because her hives are showing signs of colony collapse disorder, an affliction brought about by undetermined factors that has been causing the decline in bee populations around the world. To try to find out what is happening and what to do, she has allowed Ben (Christopher Allen), a 23-year-old entomology student, to study the bee deaths in her hives.
Despite the play’s title, of the four characters only Earl is sexually active. After a series of failed relationships he has taken to having NSA sex, i.e. sex with “No strings attached” or sex just for the sake of sex. This scandalizes the prudish Gail, especially when Earl suggests that she and he should try it out together. Fortunately for her strict morals, she has other business to attend to, namely the last-ever Turkey Day Dance, a local festivity in which the populace has shown declining interest. Sarah initially has no intention of attending, but eventually she she decides to go with the young, single Ben.
Without giving away too much of the plot, I can say that the Turkey Day Dance and its celebration of birds mating in the spring has a direct effect on both couples. Up to the end of Act 1, Crawford has depicted the inhibitions and their casting off in both couples in purely comic terms. In Act 2, however, he forces both couples to confront the effects of their wild abandon which are far more serious than funny. Crawford does not lose his knack for presenting the most amusing side to these events, but he also makes us see that both couples are going to have to make difficult life-changing decisions.
The parallel stories of Gail and Earl and Sarah and Ben ask in totally different ways whether people can have purely sexual relationships without getting emotionally involved. Looking at the four as individuals, Crawford finds a deeper kind of comedy. The four have each viewed their lives within certain set parameters. The most sophisticated aspect of Crawford’s comedy examines if and how the characters will be able to move beyond their own restricted views of themselves.
The main flaw with the production is the peculiar set that Gillian Gallow has designed. Through the invisible fourth wall we see Gail’s second floor bedroom stage right and the room that used to be Sarah’s on stage left, but where to put the hallway bathroom has obviously stumped her. If it is where the doorway presently suggests, its floor would cut off access to the stairway beneath it. Either Gallow should make the hallway to the bedrooms longer to make it appear to go around the bathroom or the stairs to the second floor should go straight up the middle without a bend into the hallway.
Director Ann Hodges has given the play a swift pace and has drawn excellent performances from the entire cast. It’s very hard to imagine that anyone could play the role of Gail better than Nora McLellan. She is a master of tone of voice and can give even the simplest words a spin of anger, disgust, interest or dismay as well as suggest the opposite of what she is saying. McLellan is also expert at communicating her character’s reactions silently through the slightest facial gestures. When Earl whispers in Gail’s ear details of his sexual expertise, McLellan manages through her facial reactions alone to convey both a surface of feigned disgust underpinned by growing attentiveness. McLellan’s odd vague hand gestures to convey the idea of sex, a word the uptight Gail can’t bring herself to say, are exquisitely funny in themselves.
Even though Marion Day’s characters Sarah is in a very bad mood when we first meet her, she immediately wins our sympathy since Day shows that beneath the brusqueness of Sarah’s manner lies real distress. John Dolan’s Earl appears at first to be merely a loafer one might well steer clear of, yet Dolan suggests through the earnestness of Earl’s tone that Earl may have depths that even he is not fully aware of. Newcomer Christopher Allen is hilarious as Ben. Seldom have I seen anyone play a combination of geekiness mixed with youthful embarrassment and confusion so convincingly. Yet, at the same time Allen brings out an inner warmth and good will in Ben that is immediately attractive and that become Ben’s dominant qualities in Act 2.
The Birds and the Bees happens to have the honour of being the Blyth Festival’s 200th production and its 125th world premiere. Crawford’s gift for finding both humour and hope in everyday life makes his play fully worthy of that honour. Catch the world premiere production while you can, but expect to see more productions of this hilarious but thoughtful comedy far and wide.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Nora McLellan, Christopher Allen and Marion Day; John Dolan and Nora McLellan. ©2016 Terry Manzo.
For tickets, visit www.blythfestival.com.
2016-07-10
The Birds and the Bees