Theatre Review by Christina Manolescu</MARQUEE>
Graced with an atmospheric surround-sound—the outdoor racket of live radio, funky jazz, passing freight trains, warring neighbours, and so on—the stage setting at Theatre Ste-Catherine débuts as a drifting pandemonium of clutter, reflective of a fragmenting life and mind. Single mother, Renée (Laura Mitchell), and her fractious, impoverished family are pulling up stakes and are on the move again.
The story begins squarely on Montreal’s home turf, within the city landmarks of upper and lower Westmount, peppered with Franco/Anglo references and enlivened by a lot of familiar Franco/Anglo cursing. The deliberate contrast of ‘above-and-below-the-tracks’ societal culture establishes this family-at-war-with-itself and its ‘great divide.’
Matronly yet childless, well-off Sylvie (Debra Kirshenbaum) exercises angelic patience with her frenetically creative, charismatic yet mentally fragile sister, Renée.
Taylor Baruchel, as ‘Elle,’ is Renée’s exuberant, drop-dead gorgeous, musically gifted daughter—Baruchel, by the way, is a truly talented singer—catapulted into adulthood through years of having to ‘play mother’ to her own child-mother
Renée’s Buddhist neighbour-cum-wannabe actress, Ocean, played by Janis Kirshner, sashays blithely in and out of this familial disaster zone in the guise of confidante, comforter and care-giver. Ocean becomes less and less altruistic, however, once competing fortune smiles her way.
Mitchell convincingly portrays the bipolar personality, Renée, who deliberately rejects her psychotropic ‘meds,’ precipitating yet another dreaded mental collapse.
Ostensibly, Renée decides to seek salvation through the creative outlet of her poetry. But it is her stalker-type obsession with an elusive psychotherapist—at times deified as Gotman, goatman (perhaps a wily satanic reference), museman or Jesus—that, paradoxically, drives all her sound intentions to hell.
The script’s colloquial dialogue is studded with high-concept literary, feminist and philosophical allusions. Amongst the comedic barrage of jokes and one-liners, one of the most dramatically chilling scenes is that of the ‘three graces,’ Ocean, Sylvie and Elle, morphed to an unholy trinity of black&gold harpies, venting their rage and scorn upon the bane of their existence, the benighted Renée.
For two hours or so, under the microscope or the proverbial ‘bell jar,’ we witness the skillful dramatic development of a theme: the gradual disintegration of the human mind. Entire facets of the personality begin to shred apart: the brain and its neural connections, the sense of perception, objectivity, judgment and imagination, followed by the collapse of the competent academic, the aspiring poet, mother, lover, sister and friend.
In denial of her own careening plunge into madness, Renée becomes a sleepwalking time-bomb, repudiating while—at the same time—clinging onto her ‘nearest and dearest,’ a rag-tag communal healing circle who do their best or their worst to save her (and themselves, as well).
Don’t miss this impassioned, tragi-comic yet hopeful and uplifting play.
Theatre review by Christina Manolescu © 2007, Invisible Cities Network