Dead Man's Cell Phone

"We are in a perpetual state of mourning." This line is uttered in one of the play's monologues, commenting on the tendency of people today to wear black for all occasions. Of all quotations, this is the one that stood out the most to me. There is a truth to it that is apparent nowhere more than in a play that explores our increasingly complex relationship with life and death.

Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone opened the Persephone Deep End series for this year, continuing the tradition of dark, edgy, and slightly experimental theatre. We open with a dead man slumped over in a café, with his cell phone ringing. Kristina Hughes plays Jean, the well-meaning woman who happens upon this scene and, seeing a problem, resolves it the best way she can: by answering the phone. In this small act, she becomes inextricably bound with the dead man, Gordon, becoming his executor of sorts, taking responsibility not only for spreading news of his death through the Cloud but also for the emotions of those close to him. In trying to comfort Gordon's loved ones (so to speak) Jean ends up constructing a convoluted web of lies, fabricating her own relationship with this man whom she really knows nothing about. The dead man's cell phone becomes a crutch for her, an addiction, although she cannot say exactly why.

For the entire duration of the play, I had one lingering question in my mind: Why am I the only one laughing? Indeed, I still can't say for certain, but I will say that I should not have been. Jeffrey Pufahl's direction played up the darkly comic aspects of the script brilliantly, and was assisted in no small part by Kristina Hughes' sense of timing. There is a harsh juxtaposition between the darkness of the subject matter and the hilarity of some of the interactions, but that in turn just makes it funnier. One particular scene where Jean tries to comfort Gordon's family by presenting them with "gifts" that Gordon left them was one of the funniest things I've seen in the theatre in recent memory; the incredibility of Jean's story is made more absurd by how readily accepted it is by everyone else (I was also sitting right in front of Jeffrey Pufahl during preview, so I can only assume that he appreciated my hearty reaction).

Dead Man's Cell Phone is a triumph of modernist storytelling. Instead of trying to probe the human mind in spite of growing technology, it pulls the veil off how our lives (and deaths) are shaped by those devices with which we surround ourselves. Although Gordon expires before the play opens, his cell phone carries on; and because of that lifeline, he continues to live and grow in the hands of Jean, becoming a better person than he ever was before. Through Jean's growing obsession with the cell phone, the play becomes a story about how we strive to connect with people through technology, but those connections are never completely honest. But then the play starts to go somewhere different, and shortly after coming back from intermission I got a creeping sensation that we were headed toward and unsatisfying conclusion. We were. The play spins off into corporate intrigue, then metaphysical moralising. By the time we reach the end, it feels we've come a long way from the theme with which we started. The actors carry through very well, but the script loses direction.

The strength of the play falls on Kristina Hughes as the uptight businesswoman who is drawn into a strange new world. Her well-meaning innocence helps supply a lot of the comedy in the play. Leon Willey plays Gordon, as a limp corpse in the first scene, then later soliloquising in the play's more abstract segments. There is a profound juxtaposition between the two: Gordon the suave, manipulative sociopath, and Jean the awkward but kind-hearted good samaritan. Their differences create a delightful amount of friction when Jean realises just who she's allowed herself to connect to. Willey also plays Gordon's brother Dwight, timid and nerdy; his scenes with Jean supply the plays soft, romanticute moments. Then Natalie Feheregyhazi does a turn as both Gordon's widow Hermia, sullen and repressed, and his waifish French lover. She displays a gift for both dry humour and over-the-top characterisation. The real scene-stealer is Sharon Bakker as Gordon's emotionally fragile mother, who utters the fateful line that I mention at the top of this review. She grabs the attention of the audience with her high, wavering voice, then clamps onto it with her lugubrious speeches, providing the play's deepest emotional resonances.

The sad fact is that the substance of the play felt like two scripts stapled together, but it still succeeds on many levels by the strength of the cast and its biting humour. And even though I don't like how she ended things, I do give Sarah Ruhl credit for jumping into the deep end (see what I did there?) to probe the complex and sometimes damaging relationships with those miniature lives we call cell phones.

All My Sons: Fracture and Rapture

Fragmentation. That's what it's all about.

The thing about walking into a new production is that it comes upon you in stages. More and more theatres are forgoing the practice of drawing a grand drape across the stage, sealing the rapturous world therein until the designated time — and in a black box theatre like the Emrys Jones it is quite impossible. This means that as we shuffle to our seats we are able to cast our eyes on the set, vacant, gloomy, and a bit haunting, waiting to be peopled. And in a theatre this size, there is no way to conceal it from the neutral blaze of the house lights; it is laid bare without the benefit of atmosphere, for us to freely molest it with our eyes. As I think on it now, it is an unsettling thing for the set to be so naked and defenseless, but that is the world in which we live, so the set must be strong enough to withstand it.

All My Sons is a play of juxtapositions. This realisation washed over me as I was contemplating the set before the play began. The first image is that of a cozy backyard, paragon of domesticity from some idyllic yesteryear that we can only describe as after the Great Depression but before the first season of Mad Men. It is bright, cheerful, and serene, with the aft side of a house adorning the upstage wall, giving the impression of a warm and welcoming home within. However, as your vision pans backward, you can see the house lose definition around the edges. The walls don't just stop cleanly and extend into the imagination; they become jagged and uneven, sporting gaps and fissures, with the siding become more sparse as it extends outward until it eventually fades into oblivion. The tiles forming the garden pathway as well break away and recede into a twisted Rorschach shape. And one is left with the impression that one is looking at a deteriorating dream moments before waking. Like I said, fragmentation.

The play, Arthur Miller's first major success on stage, centres on the Keller family living in the aftermath of the Second World War. Joe is an aging tradesman who made a living during the war manufacturing airplane parts. His son Chris is a veteran with big dreams who feels somewhat constrained by his family. His other son, Larry, was a fighter pilot who went MIA during the war and is presumed dead by everyone except Joe's wife Kate, who holds vigil night after night waiting for her lost son to return. At the epicentre of the drama is a spindly tree, planted in Larry's honour, which is snapped in half by a strong wind at the play's opening. This act of God foreshadows the eventual fracturing of their suburban content, as Chris brings in Larry's old flame Ann, with the intention of making her his own wife, something he knows will devastate his mother. And indiscretions in Joe's past which at one point raised accusations of "murderer" will come back to haunt him, and his good-natured charm may not be enough to deflect them.

Contemporary critics regarded All My Sons "a very depressing play at a time of great optimism." I can understand the sentiment — after all, post-war America was buzzing with jingoistic fervour and everyone was looking forward to starting their families in a future that looked brighter than ever. Even those who lost loved ones could still take solace in nobility of their sacrifice. This sense of optimism is captured well in the opening scene, where Joe spends a quiet morning in the yard with neighbours in sweater-vests fluttering around, making the idle chatter of men whose lives have more or less plateaued. The only thing to offset their idyll is the little broken tree at the corner of the stage. The significance of that death ripples outward until soon everything we thought we knew about their situation is peeled away. The hopes and dreams of the characters are flayed, leaving bare their doubts and insecurities, until it becomes clear that there is no hope, even in this hopeful time.

For this reason, I think All My Sons is more apropos today than it was when it was first produced. It is a play that speaks to an age of uncertainty. We no longer take comfort in the justice of our wars, and as Kate Keller curses through the realms of God and Man for having her son taken from her, it is hard not to think of mothers we see every day, losing their children in increasingly senseless conflicts. And thoughts of the amoral corporate imperialism we see every day are stirred when we face the image of Joe placing business interests above the lives of the soldiers flying his planes. This is the world where the codes and beliefs with which people grew up have ceased to have any meaning, so all they can do is keep moving, without really knowing where or why.

Kashtin Moen is a bit of a surprise out of the department this fall. In his mainstage debut, he is adept at capturing the genteel charm of Joe Keller. He displays a very genuine warmth throughout most of the play, but he is also arresting in those moments when he cracks into pain and anger. When he says that all he did was for family, we really believe him. Chris Donlevy provides what you might call the moral centre of the play. As Chris, he is principally a reactionary character, acting as counterpoint to his father's restricted world-view and his mother's pathological denial. He commands a lot of the stage and takes on all the subtle shifts of the atmosphere in general. Jackie Block continues to grow from her Greystone debut last fall. As Ann, she plays a balancing act between homespun nice girl, blushing romantic, fearful sister, and anguished lover. She represents an emotional teeter-totter, bringing us up and down, from her painful memories to her defiant hope for a better future, eventually leading to a heart-rending emotional climax, carrying herself with fragile beauty the whole way. And Anna Seibel, already warm to the Greystone stage, offers another astonishing performance. She is a creature of many layers, and in Kate Keller we see a loving mother and devoted wife, veiling a rage against both Heaven and Earth for their dual roles in taking away her son. She is fearful and hopeful, tormented and brave; she is distant and vaguely mentally disturbed, often allowing her devotion to her dead son to override her devotion to her living son. Anna Seibel brings these things whirling together, bringing the audience to yearn with her, eventually sending them crashing down when she hits her emotional tipping point. Like I said, fragmentation.

The four principal actors are accompanied by a talented ensemble of supporting characters. Mike Prebble as Dr. Jim Bayliss has a natural charisma that allows him to command the attention of the audience. As his wife Sue, Jeanine Thrasher looks very Betty Draper with a fiery eye and an acid tongue. She is a bit of an enigma,  full of passion and resentment wrapped up in a sexy swagger, and Thrasher makes a sharp impression in her time on stage. Jesse Gagnon brings in some much-needed comic relief with his scatter-brained Frank Lubey; he can elicit love and laughter with nothing more than a simple flailing of his ladder. Joanna Munholland is remarkably subdued as his wife Lydia, the quietly dignified housewife; in theory she is the most stable of the characters, but in her interaction with Ann she betrays a confusion of how this life became hers. Vernon Boldick as "neighbourhood boy" Bert can best be described as adorable, brimming with youth and vitality. Then Rohan Keenan as Ann's brother George only appears in one pivotal scene but packs it with a great emotional density. His sullen reserved anger gradually bubbles to the surface in a fiery confrontation with Joe.

In Pamela Haig Bartley's hands, this play unfolds as a very evenly paced character exploration, burning with emotional tension. It raises questions about what we believe and what drives us. There is a sense of profound ennui and crippling uncertainty reminiscent of last year's Three Sisters, with moral conflicts that hearken all the way back to Experiment with an Air Pump. When the play begins, there are certain assumptions made about what is right and wrong that will become shattered by curtain. The play is nihilistic in some ways, systematically breaking down all sense of purpose, but it ends secure in the knowledge that there is nowhere to go but forward, which brings it back to its earlier hopeful stage, albeit in a very twisted way. 

As I look back, it seems to me there are hundreds of ways the production could have gone badly, given the philosophical and emotional depths being probed. But it succeeded thanks to the brilliant chemistry of its cast, which allowed for easier shifts in dynamic, which often happen drastically and rapidly. The cast is supported quite beautifully by Adam Naismith's expressionistic set design, breaking apart, caught in the middle of the vortex. The set is at once very tangible while remaining locked in the imagination, splitting apart just outside the characters' fields of vision. The actors — and set — interact in many different layers bouncing around divers emotions, often simultaneously, until the sense of unity they once had vanishes and we are left with fractured images seeking connection. The story is timeless: a universal tale of regret and fear, set after a period of great confusion (the war) and at the dawn of a period supposedly for happiness and reconstruction, but the truth is there can be no reconstruction because what once was can never be. Parts of the world we knew and the world we hope to have spiral down, but they can never be completely made whole.

Like I said, fragmentation.

All the World's a Stage, and All the Men and Women Precariously Close to Falling in the Orchestra Pit

Saskatchewan is a lot like a stage. It's large and flat and has some impressive lighting effects. Looking at things this way, it makes perfect sense that we are destined for developing a vibrant theatre culture. It's a slow process, of course, and certain, more Moose Jaw-shaped sections are having a hard go of it (keep on chugging, Rhubarb Productions -- unless you've already gone defunct, in which case, RIP, Rhubarb Productions). But here I shall focus on Saskatoon, where I have made my home for the past five years. Our theatre scene continues to grow and flourish, although it is still difficult to find people who really talk about it. And that is what this Weblog shall be about: talking about it.

This Blog was the victim of many a false-start as I tried to get it up and running. At first, I was going to use Fringe as my launching platform; but alas, due to temporal and monetary constraints, I was only able to catch a relatively small portion of the shows going on at the Festival this summer, and it didn't seem like "Ruminations on the Seven Fringe Shows I Happened to See" made for a particularly auspicious premier entry. Then I contemplated using Two Corpses Go Dancing as my starting point, but I'm still so in love with that play that I don't really trust myself to provide a lot of serious critical discourse on it. A month or so ago, at the Live Five Launch party, I decided it was time I seriously pushed forward. Importance of Being Earnest was going to be my inaugural review, but I got held up, principally because I still hadn't thought of a name. But here it is: Prairie Groundling. I spent weeks in solemn contemplation attempting to find a title that could evoke both theatre and Saskatoon in a suitably pithy manner, and this was the best I came up with (really). And now, at long last, I shall launch this Blog in earnest (see what I did there) tonight, as I go to attend the premier of Greystone Theatre's first title All My Sons. Since Greystone Theatre is where I started writing about theatre in the first place, it seems to be an apropos starting point for my Saskatoon Theatre Blog. Later this week I'll follow with retrospective reviews on Persephone's Importance and Dead Man's Cell Phone. These reviews will not be timely, obviously, but my goal here is not to create a lot of "Go see this / Don't go see this" reviews. Rather, I have the simpler goal of creating a world where, if someone wonders if any writing on their production exists, they can find some.

As I said, false starts. I have given myself pause several times wondering if there really is a point to this Blog. No doubt many of the tens of people who stumble across this page will pose the same question: Why Saskatoon. I have answered this question, finally. I know why Saskatoon because today as I was trying to eat my lunch while a co-worker was talking on the phone about how much she hates Saskatoon. As someone who actually chose to live in Saskatoon, I felt slightly offended. Then I felt a surge of pride. Then it occurred to me that no one else was going to write about Saskatoon's independent theatre scene, so why shouldn't I?

I suppose this is not a terribly inspiring introduction, but it's mine. My name is Blair Woynarski, and this is the Prairie Groundling.