Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✭✭
by Will Eno, directed by Meg Roe
• Shaw Festival, Studio Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
August 4-September 10, 2017;
• Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto
November 16-December 1, 2018
Cop: “Things are fairly predictable. People come, people go. Crying, by the way, in both directions”
There are several must-sees at the Shaw Festival this year, but no theatre-lover should miss Middletown by Will Eno. The American playwright, heavily influenced by Samuel Beckett, has had plays like his Thom Pain (based on nothing) (2004), Title and Deed (2011) and The Realistic Joneses (2014) produced in Toronto. But Middletown (2010), which has never been seen in Toronto, is more accessible than these and more universal in scope. The Shaw Festival gives the play beautifully imagined production with impeccable performances from the entire cast.
Middletown fits into the Shaw Festival mandate since it is so clearly a response to Thornton Wilder’s classic American play Our Town (1938), revived at the Shaw Festival just last year. Like Our Town, Middletown is a look into the lives of ordinary people in a small town and similarly requires a bare minimum of sets and props. Director Meg Roe has staged the play in the round at the Studio Theatre so no backdrops are even necessary. Instead designer Camellia Koo has created a floor that looks like the blow-up of a photo from the Hubble Space Telescope of one of the fantastically coloured clouds in outer space.
Some critics have referred to Middletown as an “anti-Our Town”, but that gives a false impression of Eno’s achievement. Eno has not set up his play as a critique of Wilder’s. Rather Middletown is Eno’s view of what a 21st-century Our Town would be. Wilder’s 1938 play looked back with nostalgia on the certainty and stability that imbued life in Grover’s Corners in the period 1901-1913. Wilder’s portrait was of an idyllic time that by 1938 had already passed away.
Eno’s play portrays the world we live in now where all the certainty and stability Wilder celebrates have long since disappeared. Wilder’s play focussed on two neighbouring nuclear families in Grover’s Corners – the Webbs and the Gibbses – each with a resident father and mother – the father the wage-earner, the mother the housekeeper – and each with school children living at home.
In Middletown all the characters live in isolation. We may hear of characters’ spouses, parents or children but we don’t see them. The family unit as a building block of society has disappeared as has religious faith or the belief that life has any point.
Eno reflects the contemporary lack of social order in the structure of the play. There is no Stage Manager as in Wilder to guide us through the action and set up scenes. Instead, the actor who welcomes us to the play as the Public Speaker (Fiona Byrne) is different from the one who plays the Cop (Benedict Campbell), the closest character in Eno to the Stage Manager. The Public Speaker’s Prologue almost maniacally welcomes not just the present audience to the play but, in an absurdly inclusive list, anything that breathes, has existed or will exist. If we had any doubts that Middletown represents a microcosm of the world, the Prologue handily quashes them.
Rather than the empty stage that Wilder’s Stage Manger has to himself, Eno starts the play with a space already inhabited by the Mechanic (Jeff Meadows), a local guy, often drunk, who can’t manage to stay out of trouble. He is a parallel to the alcoholic organist Simon Stimson in Our Town, who is the subject of much gossip, except that this minor character in Wilder has become a major character in Eno. Wilder’s play had a policeman, Constable Bill Warren, but in a like manner, this minor character becomes a major character in Eno.
Rather than a creator of the theatre, Eno has the Cop, an upholder of law and order, subject to his own demons, take on the Stage Manager’s function of introducing the town and its people. He is irked, in fact, not be alone to do his introductory monologue and eventually takes out his anger shockingly by nearly choking the Mechanic to death. After that we can hardly accept the Cop as the kindly reliable guide to the town that he would like to be.
Just as the young lovers George Gibbs and Emily Webb had facing windows in Our Town, so do the two main characters in Middletown – John Dodge (Gray Powell) and Mary Swanson (Moya O’Connell). The difference is that both of Eno’s characters are middle-aged. Mary is married and pregnant and has been sent ahead to Middletown where her husband plans to meet her although he never shows up. John is a handyman and long-time resident of Middletown but he is suffering from depression and can barely see the point of going on. They both see each other framed in their windows at night and sense the anxiety the other feels.
They meet at the town library which is only one of two places that Eno’s conception of the town allows people to meet. The other is the hospital. Just as ideas are lost and found in the library so does life arrive or depart in the hospital. John and Mary will meet in both places. The relation of John and Mary is both funny and sad. Without his inner torments and her outer commitments the two might have become a couple, but their “almost” connection is the closest that anyone can achieve in Middletown.
We wonder that as dull a place as Middletown would have any tourists, but, comically, it does and those tourists (Peter Millard and Claire Jullien) are so odd they get on the nerves of the Tour Guide (Sara Topham). From their banter we see that the tourists have travelled widely but not to widen their minds as much as to confirm their own ideas. What they want to see most in Middletown is not any of the town’s official sights but a meadow that reminds them of the place they first met. The visit of the tourists is an externalization of the central malaise of the Middletonians in being unable to see beyond themselves. Conversations they have with each other are more like interleaved monologues than exchanges of ideas and feelings.
Another metaphor for the typical Middletonian is the image of an astronaut, the town’s one famous scion. This scene gorgeously but simply imagined by Roe and lighting designer Kevin Lamotte, shows the Astronaut (Karl Ang) looking down on Earth with the mixed feelings of wonder at the miracle of its existence and of its insignificance in space. The astronaut may seem to be the ultimate symbol of isolation but, in fact, it has taken the effort of a huge number of people to put him where he is.
This encapsulates the dilemma that arises in all the Middletonians’ speeches. They all agree that life itself is a miracle. As Mary says, “When you think of all the miracles it takes just to sit in a chair. A billion things going right, just to sit here. And do nothing”. One might also think of the ancestors whose product she is and, as the play mentions, all of evolution that has created those ancestors. The problem is that none of the Middletonians have any idea what the point of this miracle is. Not knowing what all this effort was for or what to do in this middle space between birth and death is the source of the Middletonians’ anxiety.
Like Our Town, Middletown ends with a simultaneous birth and death but unlike Our Town Eno depicts no afterlife and no graveyard. His characters, unlike Wilder’s, have no chance to reflect on what a life lived means. As one of Eno’s built-in audience members remarks at intermission, we can’t really discuss what the play means because we’re still in the middle of it. In Eno’s view every living person is always in the middle of life and therefore can never have an outside perspective on it.
Filled as it is with the most essential questions of life, death and what the point of it all is, Eno’s play is still very funny and under Meg Roe’s direction the cast consistently evoke our sympathy as fellow travellers doing their best to cope with the enigmatic journey they are on.
While the vast majority of the scenes are two-handers, the show demands a tightly knit ensemble. Roe seems to recognize this by having the entire group involved in drawing the city at the start, and often actors do not exit but sit among the audience in designated seats. It is an irony of which Eno is likely aware that to stage his play involves hierarchy, direction and communal action whereas the world he depicts has none of these. Eno may be suggesting that people can find purpose on in the act of creation, an idea borne out by the strange fate that befalls the Mechanic at the end of the play.
In the midst of the many individuals of Middletown, certain ones necessarily stand out. Prime among these are the non-couple of John and Mary. Moya O’Connell is radiant as Mary. She is almost iridescent as she reflects the many, swiftly changing moods of the character from loneliness to flirtation to embarrassment to embarrassment at being embarrassed to concern, changing from feigned to real, to joy in the midst of sadness. So many young actors have difficulty expressing simultaneous emotions while O’Connell can not only express them simultaneously but their simultaneous shifting into other emotions. It’s a magnificent performance.
As John, Gray Powell does not quite match O’Connell in variety but he does give one of the subtlest performances he has ever given. He, too, depicts a tumult of conflicting emotions except that in John’s mix is a dark emptiness that can momentarily negate any positive emotion he feels. Frequently, we can see this dark cloud pass over his thoughts as we watch him fight to continue despite it. Powell makes us feel that John was close to despair and self-destruction before he met Mary and that it is only because she is his neighbour that he has any renewed desire to carry on. Though John would never say so, Powell lets us know that Mary’s request to have John fix her sink gives John a new reason for living.
Jeff Meadows’s Mechanic is an enigma from the start. The Mechanic seems like a harmless petty criminal and layabout whose meditation on life’s pointlessness paralyze him from doing anything with his life or at least become an excuse for doing nothing. His habit of drifting about the town spying on people is an expression of his own isolation and in turn makes him feel more isolated. He is a man who once had the ability to create and the capacity for wonder, but has lost them both. Meadows captures this unfortunate man’s simultaneous desire and inability to believe in himself or befriend anyone else.
The closest friend the Mechanic has is paradoxically his main tormentor, the Cop, though perhaps being tormented is the only close relationship he thinks he deserves. It is a major plus in casting that Benedict Campbell, who played the Stage Manager in Our Town last year, should play the Cop in Middletown. Campbell’s Cop may have the same resonant voice, but the Cop is no kindly, all-seeing presence who guides us through human foibles. The Cop has a limited perspective just as do the other characters and punishes infractions rather than merely noting them. Campbell makes us sense that the Cop lashes out in punishment to avoid confronting the darkness that also lies within him.
The two cheeriest characters we meet are Fiona Byrne’s Public Speaker and Tara Rosling’s Librarian. Byrne’s delivery of the Public Speaker’s welcoming Prologue is exquisite. Byrne makes the complex run-on sentence sound completely as if she were making it up on the spot. The fact that Byrne allows a bit of desperation and mania to creep in only makes it more perfect an introduction to a play. One of Byrne’s other characters is a Doctor and here, too, Byrne allows an abruptness to perfuse her remarks that suggests the Doctor is, like everyone else, coping with some inner difficulty. The Doctor’s aggressive attitude toward the Mechanic only confirms this.
Tara Rosling’s Librarian, on the other hand, seems to be the only character who has made her peace with the gloom that engulfs the town. When Mary tells her that she’d like a library card, the Librarian replies, “Good for you, dear. I think a lot of people figure, “Why bother? I’m just going to die anyway’”. Rosling gives us the impression that the Librarian is so chipper because she at least feels she is a guardian of knowledge. Even if that exclusivity of her guardianship is becoming obsolescent due to the internet, sharing knowledge and feeling needed is what makes her happy.
Eno’s Middletown seems to be an illustration of Henry David Thoreau’s characterization of human life in Walden (1854): "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them”. If Middletown is Eno’s Our Town for the present, it suggests that humanity’s lot hasn’t changed that much from Thoreau’s time and that Wilder may have been fully aware that the idyllic picture he painted of small-town life was illusory. The characters in Eno’s Middletown are simply freer to acknowledge life’s pointlessness than the characters are in Wilder’s Grover’s Corners. Eno is unafraid to write a play that looks at life’s greatest questions and asks us to feel compassion for those who, like us, cannot find the answers. The Shaw Festival’s Middletown is redolent with compassion and it is hard to imagine the play receiving a better, more sensitive production.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Gray Powell as John and Moya O’Connell as Mary; the cast of Middletown at work; Karl Ang as the Astronaut; Jeff Meadows as the Mechanic. ©2017 David Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.
2017-08-22
Middletown