Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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by Hannah Moscovitch, directed by Sarah Garton Stanley
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
February 28-April 1, 2018
Sorrel: “You were a great first boyfriend”
The primary reason to see Bunny, a 2016 play by Hannah Moscovitch, is to enjoy the wonderfully comic performance of Maev Beaty in the title role. Beaty is on stage for virtually all of the 90-minute running time, and without the strong centre her performance provides, the episodic play with its repetitive sexual encounters would centrifugally disperse into nothing. If you are looking for an entertaining, unchallenging play, Bunny will fit the bill, but if you are looking for a play with some substance, you will have to look elsewhere.
The play begins with Sorrel (Beaty), nicknamed “Bunny”, in a canoe with an a young man who strongly suggests to her that after an hour on the lake a little sex may be in order. Sorrel hesitates and then turns to him as if in assent. Sorrel then steps out of the canoe and proceeds to speak directly to the audience to relate the long history that has led up to this scene.
Sorrel’s view is that her whole life has been warped by the peculiar upbringing she and her brother received from their parents. Both academics at a small Ontario university, they were Marxists, feminists and supporters of all arch-liberal ideas. They held political discussions at the dining room table. No pop culture entered their home in any form and an evening’s entertainment was reading Canadian poetry aloud. Growing up, Sorrel fell in love with the Victorian novel, which she defines as Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and George Eliot.
While Sorrel is brilliant at school, she has no friends because she has no common culture to share with her peers. When she turns 17, she unexpectedly blossoms into a magnetically attractive beauty and suddenly has to cope with the attentions of all the boys at school. Since being liked is novel and since she does not know how be friends, she responds to boys’ overtures of friendship by giving them blowjobs, 19 in all by the end of high school. When she finds the other girls at school view her as a slut, she realizes she needs to confine her sexual favours to one boyfriend.
The rest of the action details how Sorrel goes on to have sex with four men in succession. In each case but the last, Sorrel is the one who pressures the relationship into becoming sexual. At the end of the play, after she has long since become a professor of Victorian literature, she gains the big insight that she is not Victorian. Since Sorrel is depicted as being extremely smart, one wonders how she ever could have thought that she was “Victorian” in the first place. To gain even a B.A. in English, you have to read outside your favourite period. Sorrel would have had to read novels from the 18th, 20th and 21st centuries and understand their points of view. Are we to think she learnt nothing from this?
In Bunny neither Sorrel nor the society she lives in is criticized. Rather the blame for Sorrel’s behaviour is placed on her peculiar left-wing upbringing and on her love of Victorian novels. Since the first factor is acknowledged as peculiar, it is not universal and is therefore not relatable.
The second factor is also problematic. Sorrel lists the Victorian novelists as Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot. Austen died in 1817, twenty years before Victoria became queen and is thus is not counted a Victorian novelist. The Professor in Moscovitch’s play tells Sorrel that all Victorian novels are about is a woman choosing the right man. This applies well to Austen, but not to the Brontës or to Eliot, and we do have to wonder why Moscovitch has omitted mentioning Thackeray, Dickens, Gaskell and Trollope as Victorian novelists. Is it because their novels have to do more with painting portraits of society and its ills than with “choosing the right man”. Two novels in Trollope’s “Chronicles of Barsetshire” series, for instance, have to do with a woman deliberately choosing to live with no man at all.
All that leaves us with is the story of a woman freely living a life of sex on her terms. It may be intended as a riposte to plays supporting the old double standard where men are expected to flit from flower to flower but women are not. Yet, Moscovitch also shows that Sorrel’s sexual freedom ruins the lives of two of the four men we meet and is about to ruin the life of a third. Worse than that Maggie, the only person she could call a “friend” and the only one who tells her the truth, surprisingly validates Sorrel’s carefree ways at the very end.
Given that it’s quite clear that Maggie has been in love with Sorrel since they were students at university and that Sorrel always ignored Maggie in favour of pursuing men, the vow of friendship they swear at the end seems completely forced. It’s as if Moscovitch realized that her play had no deeper meaning and decided to tack one on at the very end. The conclusion is unearned since Moscovitch herself has not sufficiently explored the issues of friendship, or more, between Maggie and Sorrel as she could have.
That the play works on stage as well as it does is due both to the quick pacing of director Sarah Garton Stanley and her clever scene changes and especially to the performance of Maev Beaty. Beaty uses two voices throughout the action – one the calm, assured voice with a touch of irony for the mature Sorrel as narrator and one halting and well nigh inarticulate for the young Sorrel, who doesn’t know how to respond to even ordinary friendly overtures and blurts out non sequiturs of inappropriate sexual remarks. Somehow the awkward, floundering young Sorrel becomes the articulate Sorrel sometime after her marriage, but how or why this should happen is not explained.
Beaty is in fine form in both modes of comedy. She can discreetly emphasize a word to emphasize the humour of a statement as the older Sorrel and can also expertly bring out the comedy in the physical and verbal awkwardness of the young Sorrel. As written Sorrel seems only generically sorry when her change in love interest hurts someone as when she tells her first boyfriend, “You were a great first boyfriend”. Beaty plays Sorrel almost as if Sorrel had Asperger syndrome. This condition, were Moscovitch to mention it, more than her parent’s peculiarities, would explain Sorrel’s general lack of empathy, and the difficulties with eye contact, posture and gesture that Beaty uses so well to characterize Sorrel’s awkwardness in social situations.
Moscovitch has made Sorrel such a central character as both narrator and actor that one wonders if the play might have been more effective as a solo show since Moscovitch gives the other actors so little to work with to build their characters. Luckily, the play has been so well cast that most of the actors are able to to find more than one side to their characters before Moscovitch’s and Sorrel’s interest shift away from them.
Tony Ofori makes an attractive, playful Justin, whom Sorrel uses for her own purposes. The devastation Ofori expresses when Sorrel rejects Justin makes such an impression we can never fully regard Sorrel in the same unjudgemental light again. Cyrus Lane is given much more to work with as Sorrel’s favourite Professor in university. Lane reveals an escalating battle between lust and conscience in every one of the Professor and Sorrel’s sexual encounters that culminates in an agonizing decision. The character of Carol is meant to be handsome but bland and Matthew Edison manages to fulfil those to qualities without ever signalling the kind of overwhelming passion for Sorrel that Ofori’s Justin or Lane’s Professor had done.
Jesse LaVercombe has little to work with as Angel, who is simply a twentysomething jock who gets the hots for Sorrel. Gabriella Albino merely has to be Maggie’s charming daughter Lola, which she certainly is. Rachel Cairns at least has the chance to play Maggie in two different situations – well and unwell. Cairns makes the distinction so great we have to look carefully at the unwell Maggie to see the signs we once recognized in Maggie when she was well. From their first meeting Cairns suggests through subtle phrasing and gesture that Maggie is interested in Sorrel as more than just as friend, signs that Sorrel never picks up. Cairns shows us the frustration growing beneath Maggie’s general good humour, but Moscovitch really needs to allow the two a more extensive scene to work out to what extent Sorrel really is blind to Maggie’s desire. If Moscovitch had given them at least one such scene, the final affirming of mutual friendship would have more impact or at least mean something.
Given the recent #MeToo movement it is rather strange to see a play celebrating a woman’s sexual liberty as she loves and leaves a series of men that she has pressured into sex. But then the play premiered at Stratford two years ago and was written in a different sociopolitical climate than today’s. Now it seems like an odd artifact of a time when the issue of consent was not so problematic.
The story that Bunny is most like is the completely politically incorrect novel Candy (1958) by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, later made into a star-filled movie in 1968. There the naive title character is also almost magically attractive to all who look on her. At age 18, rather than Sorrel’s 17, Candy sets out to experience sex. She chooses to lose her virginity to a gardener – Sorrel chooses a farmer – but then she move on, as does Sorrel, to a professor and later a brother and sister. Yet, unlike Bunny, Candy is a satire of social hypocrisy while at the same time a celebration of the sexual liberation of youth from the social restrictions of their parents. With this in mind, Moscovitch’s Bunny seems to treading where others have already gone before but finding less to say than they did about the main character’s journey and the world in which it takes place.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Maev Beaty as Sorrel and Jesse LaVercombe as Angel; Maev Beaty surrounded by Tony Ofori, Jesse LaVercombe, Matthew Edison and Cyrus Lane; Maev Beaty surrounded by Gabriella Albino, Tony Ofori, Jesse LaVercombe and Matthew Edison. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.
2018-03-01
Bunny