Comfort

I love intimate theatre. It is something that the Saskatoon drama scene has gotten very good at, between the Refinery, the Backstage Stage, and the Emrys Jones; so when I heard about this play going on in the basement of the Two Twenty, I had to be there.

For those of you who have been to the Two Twenty den, you know that it is an unassuming room with walls of varnished plywood, blandly rectangular and not suitable for any event too large or raucous. Yet it is comforting, with a cozy, homey feeling, and thus well suited to a play called Comfort. The stage was set up almost in a round, but not quite: it was where it was, while the audience nestled in wherever they could, seating areas shooting off at odd angles wherever there was space, packed so closely inward that on more than one occasion I had to consciously pull my feet inward to avoid tripping Heather Morrison and making the experience a bit too real. While we sat there on our rickety folding chairs in this atypical space, I couldn't help but think of those bowler-hatted individuals in the early nickelodea, crowding around the moving picture, terrified by the realness of what they saw. Like them, I too had a staggeringly real experience watching Comfort.

This play, produced by Know Tomorrow Theatre, comes from the mind of Gordon Portman, recent SPC dramaturg. It is about the inception and dissolution of a marriage, played in reverse order. Our two characters, Mike (Matthew Burgess) and Sara (Heather Morrison), begin the play on the morning after a torrid farewell, in the moments before Sara walks out the door, presumably forever. The second act takes us back to the night of drunken revelry that brought the two together in the first place. Woven in among these scenes are the threads of their painful backstories, both tragic but wildly different, which bind them together but also send them hurtling toward the point at which they can no longer coexist.

As with any intimate, relationship-based play, its success falls upon its two actors. Matt Burgess checks his Velocity privilege* at the door and delivers a remarkable, grounded performance. He has the job of being the play's anchor, remaining on stage for the entire duration while Morrison's entrances announce a scene transition. The character of Mike is at the most understated I've ever seen Burgess, morose and quietly bitter. He brilliantly toes the line of obsession. The sense of loss and anger he evinces at Sara's departure in the first half of the play is heart-breaking, but also laced with something darker; there is an aggressive sense of ownership lurking deep beneath his heartache. This becomes clearer later on when we see the broken position he was in at their first meeting, and how he has only achieved a sense of self-worth through her. Mike is emotionally distorted and can only find stability through a grand web of seemingly arbitrary routines and external constructs, and when he is forced to choose between Sara and everything else, these constructs and doomed to failure. Burgess plays at a variety of levels, running both hot and cold. He commands the stage in his moments of passion, but is at his strongest in the periods of quiet, where his internal tumult seeps out in small expressions.

Heather Morrison is more enchanting than I've ever seen her. I think the beauty is how well she plays on opposite ends of the spectrum. She has demonstrated her ability to tackle grim and heavy subject matter in plays like Dying City and East of Berlin, but in my experience I haven't caught much of her playful side onstage. In the early part of the play, Sara is sombre and implacable, resigned to the end of their relationship while Mike is still reeling through emotions. But tenderness and affection still bleed through. Her stage presence becomes more commanding in the second scene, where she spends most of her time staggering around while quite drunk. In the face of Burgess's reserve and timidity, Morrison is bold, vibrant, and fun; not to mention sexy. She fearlessly embodies the physicality of the role, keeping loose and limber, opposed to the stolidity she shows in the first scene. She takes in everything around her and digests her thoughts, but still delivers the performance as uninhibited and impulsive. Even in her smaller moments, she has complete control of the atmosphere. And did I mention sexy?

Portman's script is quite clean, but a little bit messy. The dialogue is elevated, with a poetic cadence. The exchanges flow smoothly, without those unfortunate bumps that happen in regular conversation. The profundity of the everyday moment is magnified, and despite the physical immediacy of the set, the dialogue provides a layer of separation between the actors and the audience, which helps to keep the experience balanced. But even though the structure of the language is so precisely trimmed, the words still drip with raw emotion. If I were to pick a complaint, however, it is that the elevation of the dialogue can at times run away from the rest of the play. Certain lines are loaded with so much poetic finesse that they shake off the emotional reality, and there is an apparent shift from dialogue that comes from the characters to dialogue that comes from the author.

Comfort is a nebulous concept. And Comfort explores all the ways in which we deceive ourselves into feeling comfortable from one day to the next, as well as those rare moments of genuine comfort that happen upon us unexpectedly. It is a difficult play to watch at times; I'm sure anyone can relate in some capacity to the dissolution of the relationship or the emotional fragility of the characters. It is a visceral experience, and despite the artistry of the dialogue, there is nothing dulling the effect of Mike and Sara's anguish. It is a beautiful and enchanting experience, but be prepared to feel...


Discomfort.


Thank you and good night.


*By which I mean, people involved with Velocity have a free pass to do anything ever.