Theatre Review by Christina Manolescu</MARQUEE>
Special mention, of course, goes to Brad Carmichael, last seen as a timid, lacklustre lover in Tableau d’Hôte’s The Elusive, this time found himself having to do battle with the rôle of Jake, a compulsively violent, paranoid, possessive ‘control-freak,’ a danger to himself and others, at large in an unsuspecting world.
At just under three hours long, Sam Shepard’s tragic-comic and poetically allusive play-script does an impressive job of excavating and revealing the broken shards of the psyche of this potential killer, who truly LOVES the object of his jealous possession, Beth (Jessica Rose), loves her to absolute death!
Jessica Rose, as Beth, gives a sterling performance of a young woman, suffering serious brain damage, who tries to navigate her way back to the land of the living, while re-learning to talk, walk, function and make sense of the retrograde world she finds herself in.
The playwright (implicit devil’s advocate for each of the characters) leaves no stone unturned. Nor does he tire of shifting his wide angle of perspective or close-up view, as he hews a path through the collective soul wilderness, bent on tracking down the dramatic inside story.
Along the way, he encounters ‘road kill,’ random victim of the beast that’s lurking, possibly, in everyman.
It all sounds like Darwinian theory dramatized, given the belligerent stance of the victim’s father. Rifle-toting game hunter Baylor (humorously played by Rick Bel), rages that he has better things to do in life than pander to a houseful of invalids and cripples. This is poignantly echoed by Jake’s mother Lorraine (Doreen Fagan) who, at the end, concludes that nothing can be done to salvage the soul-cripples of this world, even when they happen to be amongst your nearest and dearest.
To take another analogy from Nature, playwright Shepard shows the tortuous rippling provoked by a random pebble tossed into water. Or, the classic Butterfly Effect in which he painstakingly documents how Beth’s simple indulgence of using perfumed body-oils sets off a domestic storm which, over time, drives these yoked-by-marriage families into ruin.
This is particularly true for the crusading brothers of both the victim and the aggressor, Vance de Waele as Mike and Andre Simoneau as Frankie, respectively. While Frankie tries to make amends for his brother’s act, Mike remains implacable, waging his own unilateral war of retribution. Each of them forfeits essential parts of themselves in the process; meanwhile, the ‘fault line’ between the feuding families shifts to an irreversible gorge.
Which, of course, also provokes a lot of humour and empathy for this enforced mélange of characters, notably Beth’s mother, Meg, persuasively portrayed by Melissa Paulson, who rarely appears without her old-fashioned hair curlers and who does all she can—like agonizing mothers everywhere—to contain the damage and help make things better.
Jake’s sister, Sally, (Katie Stanfield) is a true-to-life, realistic presence and an intriguing one, at that. Natural sibling rivalry aside, there’s a sense of negation and resigned fatalism in Sally, given the (perhaps) unfair innuendo that she played a subtle role, at crucial moments, in actually nudging her troubled brother over the edge.
A final word about Mainline’s offbeat stage setting for this performance in which actors circulate along off-stage corridors and materialize in dramatically floodlit locations. It makes for quite a fluidity of movement and effect, buttressing the realism of the ‘duplex’ split stage, which houses the war-torn families.
And so, despite its rather off-putting premise and theme, 'A Lie of the Mind' truly is worth seeing! Audiences will appreciate Shepard’s glittering masterwork of a play-script and the high talent of this ensemble of thespians who wrestle it into life.
Underneath the lies, as the truth rises to the surface, crusaders become torturers and aggressors turn into victims. Gradually the fine line between justifiable violence and simple evil in excess disappears.
A Lie Of The Mind examines the deceitful tricks the mind can play and the harsh reality of being surrounded by alcoholism, domestic violence and emotional instability. The play ties in one very important universal truth, each of us is on a desperate search for love and peace of mind.
Directed by Frances Balenzano A Lie Of The Mind features: Rick Bel, Brad Carmichael, Vance De Waele, Doreen Fagan, Melissa Paulson, Jessica Rose, Andre Simoneau and Katie Stanfield.
--A love ballad… a little legend about love.
Sam Shepard describes A Lie Of The Mind.