Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✭✩
by Michael Ross Albert, directed by David Lafontaine
Unit 102 Actors Company with The Spadina Avenue Gang, The Assembly Theatre, 1479 Queen Street West, Toronto
September 14-October 1, 2017
Gil: “Love is like lead poisoning”
Unit 102 Actors Company is back and as strong as ever. The company was left homeless for a year when the building that housed its theatre was slated for redevelopment (i.e. to be turned into condos). But on September 14 it celebrated the opening of its new theatre, The Assembly Theatre at 1479 Queen Street West with the Toronto premiere of a play it helped develop. Miss by Michael Ross Albert, a Toronto-based writer, had its world premiere at the New York Fringe Festival last year. It’s a tautly written thriller that revs up the tension throughout its 70 minutes until its shattering conclusion.
When you enter the new Assembly Theatre you immediately find yourself confronted with designer Adam Belanger’s amazingly effective recreation of a musty, wood-panelled classroom at an all-boys private school. Emblems of the school’s heritage – its coat of arms, the pictures of past head-masters – reek of privilege and conservatism. Into this room rushes Laura (Nola Martin) out of the rain in some distress. She is quickly followed by Gil (Trevor Hayes), her fiancé of several years who has tracked her down because she has been avoiding him. Some tragic accident has occurred about which neither wants to speak. Yet, neither can help alluding to it and piece by piece we put together what we think must have happened.
Upstairs one of Laura’s students, 15-year-old Tyler, is undergoing a disciplinary hearing to determine if he will be expelled. He got into a fight with another boy, Derek, that became so violent that Derek may lose an eye. The mystery is why this incident should so upset Gil. It is dangerous to reveal too much, but to discuss the play I must say that we soon learn that Laura, who was four months pregnant, tried to break up the fight and as a result was struck by Tyler leading her to have a miscarriage. Gil thus holds Tyler directly responsible for ruining Laura’s life and his. The miscarriage has ended any hope Gil had that a child would bind him closer to Laura who had been drifting away from him and this has sent him into a downward spiral of alcoholism.
When Tyler (Wayne Burns) enters, we find that he is nothing like what we expected. He is no school thug, but self-possessed, intelligent and seemingly more emotionally stable than either of the two adults. Immediately we have to begin re-evaluating the situation.
Albert has presented us with circumstances that we think we understand, but gradually he shows that our own prejudices have led us to draw false conclusions about the situation and the characters and that an entirely different explanation lies behind what we see – one that challenges conventional ethics. In structuring the play this way, Ross is following a trail already blazed by Scottish playwright David Harrower’s psychologically brutal Blackbird in 2005. Yet, though Miss deals with some of the same incendiary material as Blackbird, Albert’s main focus is on what it takes to drive normally non-violent people to violence.
Director David Lafontaine has given the show an ideal pacing, slowly but inexorably increasing the tension until the end. He is so successful that our level of anxiety jumps anytime any two of the three characters are left alone with each other.
The role of Laura as Albert has written it requires the actor to speak in an evasive manner while hinting at one or more subtexts about which she has conflicting views. This is an extremely difficult task and it must said that while Nola Martin conveys much of what Albert asks of her, she doesn’t quite convey everything. The surface of what Martin’s Laura says is always clear but the pain of all the details she is hiding often is not. Martin does, nevertheless, carefully depict the emergence of resolution in Laura from the confusion Laura was in at the start. Martin also exudes an enigmatic sense of dread from the very beginning that makes us eager to find its cause.
Trevor Hayes is an ill-used and fairly dim Gil, a chartered accountant who lacks wit and grace and whose only motivation in life has come to be his love for Laura. Hayes is excellent at depicting Gil’s decreasing cognitive functions and his increasing aggressiveness as he progressively becomes more inebriated throughout the action. Hayes has Gil descend into a dangerously unstable state of loathing for everyone, including himself, that causes him to lash out viciously at anyone his thinks has thwarted him.
Wayne Burns has remarkable presence as Tyler. Burns makes Tyler sombre and calm in contrast to the emotionally volatile Laura and Gil, but Burns also suggests that this calm derives from a deep feeling of hopelessness. While convincingly playing a 15-year-old, Burns also convincingly shows Tyler to be wittier and more articulate than the two adult characters. This ability to convey Tyler’s youth and the wisdom he possesses beyond his years is absolutely essential for the play to work, and this Burns gets exactly right.
The only previous play of Albert’s that I have seen is Karenin’s Anna in 2014 and Miss is a major advance in complexity of character and theme over the earlier play. Aspects of the ending of Miss may underline the symbolism too obviously, but that doesn’t take away from the play’s tight, masterful construction.
Some of the giddy opening night audience celebrating the theatre’s opening seemed to think the dialogue was extremely funny. It is not. And the actors deserve credit for soldiering on in earnest despite audience’s jarring reactions. One hopes subsequent audiences will see Miss for the disturbing, tightly wound thriller it is. My anxiety increased with every minute that the working onstage clock noisily ticked off. Lafontaine has staged the concluding struggle so realistically that you may find it too difficult to watch. But the realism of the acting, direction and language are the highlights of the play. The crisp production and the daring choice of play suggest that the Unit 102 Actors Company is off to a auspicious start in its new home.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Wayne Burns as Tyler, Nola Martin as Laura and Trevor Hayes as Gil.
For tickets, visit unit102actors.com.
2017-09-16
Miss