Tonight we had the second of four shows in the annual Theatre Ontario Festival, bringing together the "best of the best" from four regional festivals around the province. One of the little oddities of the entire festival routine is the way that certain plays can appear quite often for a year or two. This is the second year in a row that a production of this play has been entered into the QUONTA Drama Region annual festival.
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Agnes of God -- John Pielmeier
Representing QUONTA (Northern Ontario region)
Presented by Gore Bay Theatre
John Pielmeier's drama was staged on Broadway in 1982, now 33 years ago. It was inspired by a historic event happening a few years earlier in upstate New York.
Sister Agnes, a young and naïve nun, has given birth to a baby and then apparently killed it. Agnes has insisted that she has no memory of the events, but she has been charged with manslaughter. Dr. Martha Livingstone is a court-appointed psychiatrist, assigned to try to determine whether Agnes is sane enough to stand trial. She engages in a war of wills with the Superior of the Convent, Mother Miriam Ruth, with the health and soul of Agnes at the centre of their battle.
The nature of this material, and the nature of the climactic scenes of the play, force a director to handle the material with great care so that it does not simply deteriorate into cheap melodrama. The three roles present supreme challenges to the actors, and especially to the person playing the role of Dr. Livingstone who is on stage for virtually the entire show and has to speak over half of all the text, much of it in the form of lengthy monologues.
Co-directors of this production (and co-producers) are Walter Maskel and Andrea Emmerton. The note they placed in the programme specified that "A skeletal representation of rooms in a convent and doctor's office is a metaphor for the skeletons we hide within our homes and within ourselves." I don't care for these kinds of explanatory notes in general, because I feel a play production, like any other artistic creation, should be capable of "explaining" itself on its own terms. More to the point, any work of art derives its value from the intellectual/emotional interaction between the artwork and the audience. To tell the audience ahead of time the meaning of what they are going to experience strikes me as a form of domination by the artist -- whereas I would far rather derive my own meaning from what I encounter. In this case, I found the note doubly unfortunate because the set which I then saw on entering the theatre did not suggest to me either the rooms (too abstract) or the metaphorical skeletons in the closet (too neat and symmetrical). It's a pity because the set as it was supported the show beautifully. It was the program note which proved truly unhelpful for me.
Another choice made by this group was to present the play as a long single act. I've experienced the play before in several productions as a two-act play, and I definitely would prefer the single-act option because of the required build-up of tension across the span of the play.
Keeping the three actors on the stage at all times and having them moving in and out of the lighted areas is almost a necessity given the play's structure, and was handled with care and sensitivity. What worked against the build-up of the show's power was the length of the scene changes. Some of these needed to be quicker, snappier, especially in the later scenes. As the story moves towards its climax, the same leisurely transitions that were so lovely earlier on now became tedious. This slow pacing was also a problem during the "inset" scenes, the ones where Mother Miriam Ruth moves into a reminiscence of an earlier event during an interview with Dr. Livingstone, and then returns to the interview scene.
Kayla Greenman gave a haunting, memorable portrayal of Sister Agnes. This naïve young nun had an extraordinarily expressive face: twisted with fear and terror one moment, and transfused with wonder and joy the next. Her voice, too, projected all the varied emotions which flooded through her. Her singing was clear and lovely in tone, but I could have wished for less clunky articulation of each note in her extended phrases, such as this: "Kyrihe-he-he-he-he-he ele-he-he-he-hison."
Shannon McMullan drew more facets out of the character of Mother Miriam Ruth than any other actor I have seen in the role. In some ways she is the most likable character of the three, showing a most believable mixture of emotions and feelings, all tempered with a warm sense of humour. Then, as her anger is roused, the humour takes on a cutting edge and the warmth freezes into ice, until we heard the icicles forming on her every word. The great challenge of playing this part is the difficulty of projecting emotional response from inside the enveloping shield of the nun's habit. McMullan developed a whole range of characteristic stances, tilts of the head, and stage positions to work along with her varied facial expressions. Her great range of vocal tones was a huge asset too.
Tara Bernatchez as Dr. Martha Livingstone faced up strongly to the challenges of a huge role. She too made broad use of a range of vocal tones, while still remaining consistently audible -- with one exception. This was in the two sequences where she hypnotises Sister Agnes. Here her voice dropped below the limit of audibility. This was partly a matter of positioning, as she was turned to a 90-degree position, facing the wings. I also would have liked to see a less casual, more thoughtful delivery of the crucial final monologue -- the one that tells us how much the experience of meeting Sister Agnes has changed Dr. Martha's life.
This production was memorable on many levels, and the performances of the actors were all of that and more. Take the niggling doubts which I've expressed in that context. It was a gripping evening of theatre, and certainly didn't leave me wanting to check my watch!
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