Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by Rosa Labordé
Tarragon Theatre & Aluna Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extraspace, Toronto
November 16-December 17
“We’re all in the same boat”
Rosa Labordé’s latest play, Marine Life, is a romantic comedy. That might seem a change of direction for a playwright better known for dark, serious plays like Léo (2006), Hush (2010) and True (2014), but, in fact, Labordé has simply chosen a lighter genre to examine the most serious threat of our time – the death of the planet through human activity. The play is amusing with several magic realist touches, but too often Labordé seems to be trying too hard to force the play to be funny rather than letting it follow a natural flow.
As we wait for the play to begin, we can hardly avoid the message that Trevor Schwellnus’s set effectively conveys. He has projected an image of the globe with India as its focus, the hemisphere above the equator on the back wall, the half below the hemisphere below the equator on the stage floor. A typhoon-like storm system appears off the east coast of the subcontinent. Periodically a shadow covers and uncovers the disc of the the earth to signal the passing of a day. Meanwhile, surrounding this back wall and impinging on the image at several points are an array of square plastic clamshell salad containers hanging down from the ceiling in clumps. Schwellnus thus gives the central issue of the play visual impact. The world is literally being threatened by manufactured, specifically plastic, waste material.
The first action in the play, and the first in a series of rather too obvious metaphors, is our view of first-time fisherman Rupert (Matthew Edison), who casts back his fishing line and accidentally snags the passing Sylvia (Nicola Correia-Damude) in the neck. Sylvia, an virulent eco-activist, thus becomes his catch in more ways than one. Although the two are opposites – Rupert a corporate lawyer, Sylvia a protestor against pollution caused by big business – Rupert convinces Sylvia to go on a date and the next thing we know they’ve been seeing other for a month.
Rupert makes radical changes in life to please Sylvia, including changing his job, but the two still have secrets they hide from each other. It would be unfair to reveal either of Rupert’s two secrets since they are major plot points. Sylvia’s main secret is obvious from the start. She has a brother John (Justin Rutledge), though he calls himself Juan, who suffers from an unnamed mental illness. The illness makes him as mentally dependent on Sylvia as if she were his mother and he a child. If he is afraid that Sylvia is leaving him, he attempts suicide.
Of the play’s two major problems, the character of John is one. At one moment he can be completely helpless, at another completely lucid and articulate with no middle ground in between. This is not manic-depression because John exhibits no manic side, yet his frequent suicide attempts indicate that he needs much more medical care than he is presently receiving and should not realistically be in his sister’s care.
Besides this, Labordé often invites us to laugh at John. Admittedly, he looks ridiculous in a huge mariachi sombrero singing a song whose only lyrics are “This is a Mexican love song”. John’s insistence on speaking only Spanish to honour his father is somehow also meant to be funny. But no matter how foolish Labordé may make John act, it hardly feels right to laugh at someone who is so clearly mentally ill.
As a director Labordé moves the action along at a swift pace, often having the beginning of one scene overlap the ending of the one before. Matthew Edison and Nicola Correia-Damude are ideal choices for Rupert and Sylvia and have an onstage chemistry that helps make their “opposites attract” relationship believable. Edison is expert at awkward physical and verbal comedy and his performance is the source of most of the show’s unconstrained humour. Edison’s character balances confidence and worry in even measure as befits a good man who wishes he had nothing to hide but knows he will sometime have to reveal all.
Nicola Correia-Damude is able to make Sylvia’s fierce activist arguments somehow take on a sensuous tone which is exactly how Rupert perceives them. Correia-Damude makes us feel that Sylvia has diverted all her passion into fighting marine pollution because, until she meets Rupert, she has had nowhere else to expend it. Her obsessive-compulsive behaviour regarded her and John’s personally not polluting the water, as in making John pee in a jar so his medications don’t enter the water supply, reflect her general desire to control the chaos of her brother’s unpredictable actions and still the claustrophobia of her brother’s morbid need for her.
Justin Rutledge does what he can with John, but Labordé has made it too difficult a role to make sense of. At least one of John’s attacks of self-destructiveness is feigned which makes us wonder how many others of them were also. This is unclear as well as why John fears that death is stalking him when all we ever see is that John, for unknown reasons, is too eagerly pursuing death. We also don’t know why John is so obsessed with his Mexican father who abandoned his wife and children instead of with his non-Mexican mother. To some degree Rutledge’s general affability helps paste over all these unknowns, but an actor’s abilities can only go so far in creating a character from a pile of ill-defined ideas.
Marine Life is successful in its didactic purpose of teaching the audience about the enormous impact of microplastics on the marine environment, a subject that one seldom encounters in the press. The speech Labordé gives Sylvia about it will certainly make some people think twice about eating fish. That purpose is successful, that is, until Labordé suddenly decides to make a 180º turn on the issue in the last moments of the play to take John’s view that we can only make people change who want to change.
An artificial happy ending that concludes we all doomed anyway is both ironic and achieved with far too much effort. Comedy should feel effortless and throughout Marine Life, Labordé seems constantly to be striving for effect including using virtually every possible cliché about fish, water and plastic in the course of her dialogue. The stage, sound and lighting design and the acting of two of the three leads is tremendous. But Labordé needs to make clearer whether the interaction of her characters is related to her theme or not for the show’s 75 minutes to be completely successful.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Justin Rutledge and Nicola Correia-Damude; Matthew Edison and Nicola Correia-Damude. ©2017 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.
2017-11-23
Marine Life