The review begins:

I confess that I went into the opening night performance of Marion Bridge at Globe Theatre feeling skeptical.

The premise, after all, sounds like the set-up to a joke: “A nun, an actress and a soap-opera addict walk into a kitchen …”

Not only that, the fact the three are sisters home together — in Cape Breton, no less — for the first time in years because their mother is dying made me fear I faced a turgid evening of stereotypical CanLit dysfunctional-family angst.

But thanks to Daniel MacIvor’s sharp writing, unexpected story twists, and above all top-notch performances, Marion Bridge won me over.

The 18th-century French poet Jacques Delille famously noted that while we can choose our friends, “Fate chooses our relatives.”

More than one family has fractured because siblings discover they have nothing in common with each other … which is exactly what has happened to the family in Marion Bridge, Globe Theatre’s next mainstage production, running Jan. 20 to Feb. 6.

Written by Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor, Marion Bridge is set in Cape Breton, where the three MacKeigan sisters have come together to care for their dying mother.

Aside from their last names, they have nothing in common. Theresa (Laura Condlin) is a nun. Agnes (Liz Gilroy) is a struggling actor.

And then there’s the soap opera-obsessed youngest, Louise, played by Judy Wensel, a recent graduate of the University of Regina’s drama department.

“She’s the only sister who still lives in the home where they all grew up,” Wensel explains. “She feels a bit of frustration. They’re in her space. But over the course of the play they find some common ground and they become sisters again. They lost sight of how family is important, and by the end of it they discover that again.”

Read the rest.

For Ruth Smillie, artistic director of Globe Theatre, the key to Globe’s upcoming production of J.M. Barrie’s classic tale of Peter Pan is that children don’t differentiate between reality and make-believe the way adults to.

Smillie, who is directing the production, recalls that this past summer she overheard a group of boys walking up and down the street, “very engaged in what they were doing,” and overheard them say, “We have to save the president,” with “enormous concern and conviction.”

It’s that kind of immersion in the world of make-believe that Smillie hopes Globe’s Peter Pan will provide to people of all ages.

***

Globe Theatre is closing out its mainstage season right now with Doubt, A Parable, a Pulitzer Prize-winner recently made into a movie. Edward Willett was there last night for the opening performance and joins me now.

First, Ed, tell us, have you seen the movie?

No, I haven’t, so the story-though I vaguely knew what it was about-was completely fresh to me. I may check out the movie now, though.

Well then, let’s forget the movie. Tell us about the play.

Doubt, A Parable, is set in the St. Nicholas Church School in the Bronx. It begins with a monologue, a sermon by the priest, Father Flynn, in which he asks the question that becomes, in a way, the theme of the entire play: “What do you do when you’re not sure?”

Flynn, who establishes that we’re in 1964 by referencing the recent assassination of President John F. Kennedy, suggests in his sermon that when you begin to question the truth of everything you thought you knew that that doubt itself, shared among many others who also have doubts, becomes a kind of social glue, a way to build bonds with other people. (And certainly doubt is the glue that binds the plot and characters of this play together!)

In the next scene we’re in the principal’s office. Sister Aloysius is the principal, and she seems like someone who has no doubts at all. She believes in being a stern, frightening figure, she doesn’t hold with newfangled inventions like ballpoint pens (or even cartridge pens-she thinks kids should learn penmanship with a proper fountain pen). She’s old-fashioned-but she’s seen a lot in her lifetime, and a lot in her school.

She talks with a very young nun and new teacher, Sister James, who, though Sister Aloysius finds her terribly innocent and naïve, has been placed in charge of the Grade 8 class. Sister Aloysius tells her she must be canny, she must distance herself from her charges and be more formal-and she plants a seed of doubt in Sister James’s mind, and in the mind of the audience, about Father Flynn. She’s concerned about Flynn’s relationship with the boys, an in particular, about his relationship with St. Nicholas’s first black student, Donald Muller. She wants Sister James to keep her eyes open for anything that seems suspicious.

Soon enough, Sister James reports to Sister Aloysius that Donald came back from a private meeting with Father Flynn acting oddly and with alcohol on his breath. Over the course of the play, we get different perspectives on exactly what the relationship is between Donald and Flynn. Sister Aloysius is convinced that Flynn has sexual designs on the boy. Flynn denies it and says he only wants to be a friend to an isolated boy who needs one. Sister James doesn’t know who to believe, but her own nature inclines her toward Flynn. And then we get another perspective when Sister Aloysius calls Donald’s mother in to talk to her, a perspective that seems both surprising and yet possibly quite valid.

The one thing all of these characters have in common is…doubt. And as we watch them struggle with it, we’re led to doubt some of our certainties about faith and where the greatest good can be found.

It sounds like the kind of play that will have people talking after they leave the theatre.

Absolutely. It’s presented in one act, about 90 minutes long, and when it was first on Broadway in 2005 the actors liked to say that the second act occurred among the audience members as they discussed the play afterward, with some people siding with Flynn and some with Sister Aloysius.

It’s impossible, of course, but it would be interesting to know how audiences would have reacted if the play had been written and performed at the time it was set, before all the news about sex scandals involving priests in the Catholic Church became widespread. I think that because of our knowledge that these things really did happen, modern audiences may be more inclined to believe that Flynn is guilty, when, in fact, there is room in the play to wonder.

It’s a beautifully written play, with subtlety and elegance and depth. It absolutely deserves the Pulitzer it won for playwright John Patrick Shanley.

This sounds like a play that demands solid acting from the cast. Who’s in it, and how did they do?

It certainly does demand good acting, and it gets it.

The key performance is, without question, that of Sister Aloysius, and Valerie Pearson is absolutely magnificent in the role. She seems at first as stern and rock-solid as the statue of a saint, but as the play progresses we see more of her human side and her own vulnerabilities and fears. One thing we never doubt–if you’ll pardon the expression-is Sister Aloysius’s absolute devotion to what is best for the children in her charge. She’s willing to do whatever she has to to protect them. She’s like a razor-sharp sword in a plain black scabbard. When she needs to, she unsheathes that blade, that core of steel in her character, and you have no doubt-there’s that word again-that she’s willing to use it.

As Sister James, Ava Jane Markus comes across as incredibly naïve and innocent at the beginning of the play-maybe a little too much so. She doesn’t seem much older than the eighth-graders she’s teaching. But she’s in sharp contrast to Sister Aloysius, and of course she’s meant to be. (The fact is, she was so young and naïve-seeming in her first appearance I was prepared to find her thoroughly annoying, but my perception of the character, and the actress, changed as the play proceeded.) A solid performance.

Father Flynn, played by Brendan Murray, also stands in sharp contrast to Sister Aloysius. He’s young, friendly, accessible. You can see why the boys like him. Is there some kind of monster hiding under that smooth surface? It would be easy for the actor to convey that impression-but Murray avoids it. If it’s there, it’s hidden…and yet, somehow Murray leaves room for it in his interpretation of the character. In other words, I thought Murray nailed the character. (He also tossed in just a faint Bronx accent-nothing over the top, but enough to help place us in the play’s milieu.)

Finally, there’s Lisa Berry as Mrs. Muller. She has only one scene, but it’s a doozey, as she demonstrates some of the same inner strength as Sister Aloysius-except that Sister Aloysius is concerned about not only Donald but all the other boys in her school, present and future, while Mrs. Muller is focused like a laser beam on protecting just one boy, her son, and not just from one possibly over-friendly priest but from a world that is set up in so many ways to hurt him, for so many reasons. (It’s not just the colour of his skin that makes him an outsider.) Berry capturesthat mother-bear-protecting-her-cub vibe perfectly, yet in a way that ensures her character seems true to her time and place in society.

In other words, there’s not a weak performance in the bunch, and of course kudos must also go to the director, Andrew North, for helping the actors achieve such fine work.

Tell us about the set.

In a way, Doubt doesn’t need much of a set. You could do it in a black box with a table and two chairs and it would still work. But Globe hasn’t gone quite that minimalist.

Designer Elli Bunton has, in fact, created a gorgeous set. In one corner is an L-shaped platform on which Father Flynn stands for his two sermon-monologues. Just below that-appropriate both for staging purposes and because it also represents the hierarchy of the church that makes it difficult for Sister Aloysius to act on her suspicions-is a square dais on which sits the desk and chairs of Sister Aloysisus’s office. Finally, the main floor serves as the school hallway and the courtyard between the school and the sacristy, with a low, L-shaped bench in the corner opposite the two platforms. A painted stone pathway surrounds that part of the stage, and there are even a couple of patches of grass to suggest the garden, but the centerpiece of the set, which stretches from the courtyard up onto the office dais, is what looks like a mosaic floor such as you might find in a very old church, with the impassive visage of a saint of some kind, face partially eaten away by missing tiles, staring blankly up at heaven. It’s eye-catching enough you might expect it to be distracting, but it isn’t in the slightest,  and of course the metaphor of a saint whose face is cracking to reveal something else beneath suits the play perfectly.

What about the costumes?

As you’d expect, it’s not a costume-heavy show. The nuns are in severe black habits, hair hidden in black bonnets. Father Flynn has the coloured vestments he wears when he delivers his sermons, but otherwise he’s also in black-except for one scene when he’s coaching basketball, when he’s in ordinary gym clothes. Mrs. Muller has dressed nicely for her visit to the principal’s office, and her ordinary-for-1964-clothes, complete with hat and gloves, actually come as a bit of a shock because they are a reminder of when the play took place-a reminder that there’s a world outside the walls of the school where things are changing, a reminder driven home just as Mrs. Muller arrives when we see Sister Aloysius listening to news reports on a transistor radio.

You obviously like the show. How did the audience react?

They were engaged throughout. I should say that, although obviously it’s a very serious play, it’s also a very entertaining one-thanks again to the writer, John Patrick Shanley. There’s lots of warmth and humor in it, and at the end of the hour and a half-which flew by; it didn’t feel that long at all, always a good sign-the audience gave it a well-deserved and immediate standing ovation.

It’s a great play, a solid cast, and a terrific way for Globe to finish its 2008-2009 season-no “doubt” about it.

Sorry.

It begins:

Mesa, Globe Theatre’s new mainstage production, is the story of a road trip — a physical journey from Calgary to Arizona, and the metaphorical journey from youth to old age.

Which sounds pretty heavy, so let me hasten to add that Mesa, well-directed by Joey Tremblay, is also very funny.

It’s 1998, and 93-year-old Bud (Sheldon Davis), is being chauffeured by his 34-year-old grandson-in-law, Paul (Curt McKinstry), on his annual winter trip to the Citrus Gardens trailer park in Mesa, Ariz. It’s the first time he hasn’t driven himself.

The characters they encounter along the way are played by Ryan Parker, also one of two musicians (with Jeremy Sauer) whose music establishes transitions — and whose rendition of The Tennessee Waltz, with its line “Now I know just how much I have lost,” provides an evocative framing device.

Since we’ve still got snow and ice on the ground, Ed, a trip to Mesa sounds pretty appealing. How does the road trip in the play come about?

Well, it’s s trip that one of the characters, Bud, played by Sheldon Davis, has been making every year since 1967, when he retired from banking. That year he and his late wife began spending their winters in the Citrus Gardens trailer park.

In the play, which is set in 1998–the date is pinpointed by a reference to Senator John Glenn’s return to space, as the oldest astronaut in history, aboard the space shuttle Discovery–for the first time Bud, who’s now 93, isn’t driving himself: instead, he’s being chauffeured by his grandson-in-law, Paul, played by Curt McKinstry, who’s in his mid-30s.

Sounds like the set-up for a little intergenerational conflict.

Exactly. A 93-year-old man who’s been driving the same route to the same location for 30 years is not inclined to change the way he’s always done things along the way. Paul, on the other hand, who’s an aspiring writer, has very romantic notions about the journey. He wants to stop and look at everything, reflect on the tragedies and triumphs of how the American West was settled, soak up the atmosphere, etc., etc. Bud just wants to get to the next Motel 6 and eat at Denny’s–or better yet, Shoney’s.

So, yes, there’s some friction between them. You could say Paul is looking to find himself in the wide-open spaces, and Bud found himself a long time ago and just wants to get through those wide-open spaces to be with his dwindling circle of friends in Citrus Gardens, to get up and tell a few jokes and sing a few songs at the Saturday night dance. He knows his life is winding down and he wants to spend what’s left of it doing what he wants. It’s something Paul comes to understand as the play progresses, and in the end he does find out something about himself by coming to understand Bud better. In other words, alongside the actual road trip, there’s a bit of a metaphorical road trip from youth to age that Bud has already made and Paul is embarking on.

All of which makes it sound just a little dank and depressing, which it isn’t, at all. It has its bittersweet and poignant moments, but in general, it’s very funny from start to finish.

Tell me about the cast, and the performances. Are there just the two actors?

Not the way director Joey Tremblay has decided to stage it. Obviously Bud and Paul run into various characters along the way (not QUITE literally, although Bud’s tendency to issue vague directions at the last possible moment brings them close to disaster a couple of times, and one unfortunate creature does meet its demise beneath their wheels). In the script, the suggestion is that Bud plays all of these characters, who only interact with Paul. But Tremblay has instead given all of those characters to a third actor, Ryan Parker, who is also one of the two musicians.

There are musicians?

Indeed there are. Parker and Jeremy Sauer provide musical cues and interludes. In fact, music ties the whole show together, with The Tennessee Waltz both beginning and ending it, with its line “Now I know just how much I have lost” in particular resonating with the theme of aging that runs through the piece.

Parker’s characters, which include a drunk in a small-town bar, a security guard at a casino and gunfight-staging used Mexican furniture salesman on the streets of Tombstone, are all very funny, in an over-the-top kind of way. My one complaint (as someone born in the U.S. whose relatives still live there) is that the playwright has used them for the kind of cheap aren’t-Americans-stupid laughs that Canadians eat up but which have been horrible clichés for decades now. Surely “I have a cousin in Toronto, you must know him” should have long since been laid to rest (preferably with a stake through its heart) as a source of amusement.

(As an aside, we made a road trip to Sante Fe, New Mexico, last summer, and our experiences with Americans included the Montana bread-and-breakfast owners who knew Canada well and loved Regina; the science fiction writer in Denver who ranches in Wyoming and comes to Regina all the time for Agribition; and the gallery owner in Santa Fe who was married to a Canadian and lived in Prince Rupert for a while–all more interesting characters than the dumb-drunk-gun-toting sports fan that makes an appearance in this play.)

How do the performances of the two lead characters stack up?

They’re both very good. Davis is playing someone decades older than his real age, but he’s perfectly believable in the role: he moves like an old man (albeit a fairly spry one) and there’s enough of a quaver in his voice to convince you of his age without turning him into a caricature. It would be easy to make Bud someone the audience didn’t like at all, given his irascibility and set-in-his-ways-iness, but Davis is sympathetic without going too far the other way and making Bud cuddly. He comes across as a real person with a real–and very lengthy–past who has good reasons for being the way he is.

McKistry is also excellent. His character is in his mid-30s, but he comes across as even younger, probably because of the contrast between his naivete and romantic notions about the West and the extremely down-to-Earth Bud. We find out over the course of the play that there’s some unhappiness in his marriage, and Paul talks about not liking the person he is when he’s up north–but that’s all in hints. My one criticism: whether in the script or in the performance, I wish we could see some hint of just what Paul is like when he’s home in Calgary. We infer it from what is said, but we don’t actually see it on stage: Paul seems too shallow a character to have any hidden depths of darkness or cynicism, especially at the beginning.

A road trip implies moving from location to location. How do they accomplish that on the Globe’s stage?

It’s cleverly done. Roger Schultz, the set and costume designer, has made a very simple but effective set that consists of a raised, circular turn-table in the middle, covered with fake grass–the cheap, unnaturally green kind–and surrounded by a little moat filled with pebbles. When the lights come up, there’s a garden gnome sitting in the middle of the turntable, a gnome whose significance we don’t discover until it appears again at the end of the play.

Surrounding the turntable is a circular road, complete with center stripes. The corners of the set are filled in with more fake grass, and there are four lawn chairs. That’s it! Put two lawn chairs together, and you have the car. And when you need to indicate that the car is twisting and turning, you put the lawn chairs on the turntable and have a costumed stage hand come out and spin it back and forth. By moving the chairs around, you can establish the bar, the casino, and so on.

To establish where each scene is taking place, images are projected on two walls of the theatre, opposite each other, above the heads of the audience. So, for example, when we’re in a cas
ino, we see images of a casino. When the characters are visiting London Bridge, sitting in its improbable location in the middle of the Arizona desert, we see pictures of it. This works well in some ways, not so well in others. Rather like those annoying television screens that are in every bar you go into any more, the images–which change constantly–draw your eye. Particularly if you’re sitting, as I was, where you have to look left or right to see them, they tend to pull your attention away from what’s happening on stage. Even when there are just variations of the same thing being shown, the images change often enough that you can’t help but look up at them frequently. As a result, though I enjoyed them, I thought at times they actually distracted from the play. I think I would have preferred something more static: a single image of the bridge, fewer images to establish travel through the countryside, so you could glance up just once in a while and not feel you were missing something.

So you have a few criticisms of the play, but overall…?

Overall, I liked it a lot. Bud and Paul are interesting characters you enjoy being with. Their journey to Mesa provides plenty of laughter and one or two lumpy-throat moments as well. Older people may identify most with Bud, younger people–especially those with elderly relatives–may identify most with Paul, but I think everyone will enjoy travelling to Mesa with them.

The audience at opening night agreed: they gave it a quick and enthusiastic standing ovation.

It begins:

The premise of Mesa, which opens at Globe Theatre on March 18, sounds like the setup to a joke: “So this 30-something guy and his 93-year-old grandfather set out on a road trip together to Mesa, Ariz. …”

And sure enough, Mesa is a comedy — but not, says director Joey Tremblay, in a “yuk-yuk, door-slamming” kind of way. Instead, he calls it a “feel-good, bittersweet, nostalgic kind of comedy.”

Read the whole thing.

Short version: I enjoyed Sexy Laundry very much.

***

Q. So tell me, Ed, was there laundry, and was it sexy?

A. There was laundry…but only in the metaphorical sense, not in the literal sense. And certainly sex plays a central role.

Q. Metaphorical laundry centered around sex? Maybe you’d better tell us what the play is about.

Maybe I’d better. Sexy Laundry, by Canadian playwright Michele Riml, is set in a swank hotel room occupied by a middle-aged couple. Alice, the wife, has rented the room for herself and her husband, Henry, in the hopes of rekindling some passion in their 25-year-old marriage. To accomplish that task, she’s brought along Sex for Dummies, not to mention a few unusual clothing items and accessories.

In between attempting various exercises from the book, Alice and Henry hash out a lot of things and discover a lot about each other they didn’t know before…

Q. That’s where the metaphorical laundry comes in?

Yes, the title is, I think, a play on the phrase “airing your dirty laundry,” as in letting it all hang out and revealing things that are usually hidden…in this case, from your spouse.

Q. Tell me about the cast, and the performances. Are there just the two actors?

Yes, it’s what they call a two-hander, and of course the premise is perfect for that.

The husband and wife, Henry and Alice Lane, are played by David Ferry and Valerie Planche, respectively. The characters are 50 years old, and the actors are in that neighborhood themselves–which means, in practical terms, that they’re both extremely experienced. You feel in solid hands throughout with seasoned veterans in these roles…and both are excellent.

Planche brings a wonderful mixture of confusion, vulnerability and desperation to the role. She’s been married 25 years, she wonders if her husband is still sexually attracted to her, and she wonders what happened to the young woman she remembers being but no longer sees in the mirror. Planche puts this all together perfectly so that you’re utterly sympathetic to the character of Alice even if you think she’s being unreasonable at times in her demands on her husband…

…and by saying that, of course, I’ve just established firmly that I’m a guy, because I suspect this is a play that men and women will experience differently, particularly married men and women, and that women may not think Alice is being unreasonable at all.

One of the terrific things about the play is the way that it captures the thoughts and fears and conversations and arguments common to all couples that have been married, no matter how happily, for a long time. I suspect every couple is going to hear echoes of things they’ve said or thought (or thought about saying) themselves.

Ferry is just as good as Henry. He’s an engineer, a practical man. He doesn’t like dancing, he doesn’t see the point of flowers (I think my favorite exchange in the play is when Henry says of flowers, “you spend fifty dollars on them and then they die,” and Alice snaps back, “I’ve spent 25 years with you and you’re just going to die, too, but I still like having you around.”) and he’s liable to go off on a rant about thin towels just when they’re trying to get intimate. But he does love his wife, even if she exasperates him, and he’s got his own reasons for the way he’s been shortchanging their relationship that come out over the course of the play.

Also, he does a mean Mick Jagger impersonation.

This play would fail if you couldn’t believe the two actors as a long-married couple, comfortable and familiar and intimate with each other. With Farry and Planche in the roles, that’s never a problem. They have great chemistry on stage.

Q. You mentioned that the play takes place in a swank hotel room. What’s the set like?

It’s very simple, but captures the feeling of what’s referred to in the script as a “synthesis of eastern design and western sensibility.” There’s a bed, of course, as the centerpiece. Then there’s a kind of double-sided cabinet that serves as the TV stand/dresser in the room on one side and the vanity of the bathroom on the other, side tables, a couple of chairs, a telephone desk. The colour scheme is red, black, purple, gray, muted but elegant. There’s even lush gray carpet on the stage, which is bit unusual in a Globe set, but of course completely appropriate, and since the actors are mostly barefoot throughout, I’m sure much appreciated on their part!

The set and costumes (pajamas for Henry, and a couple of types of lingerie for Alice) were both designed by Dana Osborne. Lighting is by Louise Guinand, and it, too, is subtle (except for one very funny segment when Henry discovers that the room has an alarming selection of mood lighting/sound effects) but effective. At one point Henry is surfing TV channels, and although there’s no TV on the set, you can see the flicker of the light from the different channels reflected on his face.

Sound in the form of appropriate (or, in the aforementioned segment with Henry, wildly inappropriate) snatches of songs also plays an important role in the play, and Jeremy Sauer did a great job in that area, as always.

Q. Some of what you’ve described sounds a little…heavy. But the title is funny. Is Sexy Laundry a comedy?

Absolutely. I laughed a lot, and so did everyone else in the audience. But it also has very serious moments, and despite all the laugh lines and humor–some of it straight-out slapstick–Alice and Henry are very definitely real people with the same kinds of problems and concerns we all have in the real world. They’re not caricatures or clowns. And that’s what lifts the play above the kind of farces we’ve all seen in dinner theatres about arguing couples and makes it much more compelling and rewarding.

Last night’s audience gave it a standing ovation, and I think it deserved it. It’s not a play for kids–aside from the fact they won’t get half the humor (and explaining the humor they didn’t get could get a little awkward), there’s a bit of strong language in it. But if you’re an adult, and especially if you’re an adult who has been married to another adult for any length of time, you’ll enjoy Sexy Laundry.

Heck, it might even convince you to rent a swank hotel room and go buy a copy of Sex for Dummies.

An excerpt:

One of the challenges for many members of the cast is the classic problem of being adults portraying children, and the one facing the greatest challenge is Toni MacRae, who plays Anne.

The show would fail if the audience couldn’t suspend its disbelief enough to accept her playing someone much younger than herself, but there’s no fear of that with MacRae. Her Anne is exactly what she should be: spunky, smart, and over-dramatic, but with a core of vulnerability that makes the character more than a stereotype.

Read the whole thing.