This review covers the final show of the four competing shows in this Festival. There are still two more articles to come in the next day or so. Watch for them!
The Drowning Girls
Written by Beth Graham, Charlie Tomlinson, and Daniela Vlaskalic
Directed by Joan Burrows
Presented by The Curtain Club (Richmond Hill)
Representing ACT-CO (Association of Community Theatres - Central Ontario)
For the second time this week we have a script which digs down deep into the roles women play in society. The difference is that this play takes us back a century to the early 1900s, and across the ocean to Britain -- not that things would have been noticeably different in Canada at that time.
This script is written in what I could only describe as a "kaleidoscopic" style. Much of this 70-minute piece proceeds in a type of choral recitation, with bits and pieces of lines chopped up, tossed around, intercut and repeated by the three actors. By contrast, there are other segments where the characters settle into slightly more extended and more traditional "scenes" for a minute or three. The divisions between scenes are marked by recitation of sentences from newspaper stories about the historic events which make up the story material. As a writer myself, I'd love to have been a fly on the wall to observe the process by which three writers created this most unusual script.
For the only time in this Festival, the audience was greeted by a closed curtain on the stage as we entered the theatre. The show's name appeared in a gobo with a lovely shimmering-waves pattern on the curtain.
The lights went down, the curtain opened, and as it did so we heard the sound of a harmonium (a parlour organ) playing Nearer, My God, to Thee. We saw a raised platform, two steps up, running across the stage with a backdrop of black curtains. Three Victorian bathtubs stood arranged in a neat row, foot ends towards the audience. There was nothing to give any indication of place, nor of time (apart from the age of the tubs), and it didn't really matter. Unquestionably the simplest -- and most gruesome -- set of the week.
One by one, the three women emerged from the tubs, each one with a loud scream and gasping for air. We heard the unmistakable sloshing of water and saw it dripping out of their Victorian bloomers.
Because of the kaleidoscopic style of writing, it takes some time for the full story to emerge and coalesce. Eventually it becomes clear that the three women we see are three victims of a single man, who has murdered each one by drowning her in the bath -- all in the space of barely two years. It also becomes clear, or at least did to me, that the three victims are now in some kind of post-death limbo.
This masterly script throws you off balance right from the start. It begins as it means to go on, as a kind of game between the first two women to emerge. The three victims each manage to express a wide range of emotions throughout the play about their common husband, their expected place in society, the dead end in which each found herself trapped which made her susceptible to the man's charm. There's a good deal of bitterness being flung around, but it's so carefully leavened with the black comedy of the play as a whole that you don't necessarily notice at first. Those angrier or sadder observations slip in under your guard, and then the realization of exactly what society did to these women gradually creeps over you later, after you stop laughing. Exactly like -- like cold water in a bath.
Each woman in turn gets her featured scenes in which she tells the key elements of her story. In those scenes, one of the other two briefly becomes another character. For instance, Margaret briefly plays Alice's mother, while -- in one of the most outrageous vignettes of the play -- Bessie later becomes Margaret's doctor. These scenes also contained the most over-the-top part of the whole play, and one of two aspects which I found disconcerting. In both the cases I mentioned, the actor who was assuming a different character also took on a ridiculously exaggerated voice as the new character. Margaret's voice as "Mother" was tremulous, but deep pitched -- an odd contrast. Bessie's voice as the "Doctor" sounded like a cartoon character getting ready to bellow "Fee, fie, fo, fum!" And indeed she did bellow sharply at Margaret a couple of times. In both cases, exaggerated physicality matched the exaggerated voice. It was cute in a cartoonish sort of way, but quickly became tedious.
The other element which began to seem repetitive and unmotivated was the frequent climbing in and out of bathtubs. I recognized that it marked scene divisions, but wondered if it needed to be done in this way quite so often.
As the play moved towards its inevitable and tragic end, Margaret did have one more scene as "Mother", a far less jokey scene in which she realizes after reading the papers that the same man has claimed more than one victim, and resolves to call Scotland Yard. The headline reading resumes, leading up to the point where the three women chorally recite the death sentence on their murderer.
There are also ensemble scenes. One most remarkable one involved all three women dancing with an unseen partner -- who was of course the same partner. Since the three are of three quite different heights, they hold their arms around the unseen man in three different positions -- just another example of the attention to detail brought to the show by the actors and their director, Joan Burrows.
Speaking of detail, the set had one spectacular surprise for us -- some distance into the piece -- when three practical showerheads hanging above the tubs suddenly came on and gently poured water down upon the drowning girls. The first time it happened, I thought it might be simply a projection because the stage was covered with a richly-coloured light wash at the moment. (In such a large theatre, I was seated far enough back that I couldn't hear the running water!) But when it next happened in full light the flow of water from the showerheads was unmistakably real. I doubt if most people in the audience even registered the presence of the showerheads before their first "appearance" as part of the action. As adjudicator Mimi Mekler dryly observed afterwards, how often do you see a show whose list of credits includes a Master Plumber?
By now, you are probably wondering when I'm going to speak to the work of the individual actors involved. It's hard to do, because the show as a whole is so beautifully balanced, and the ensemble work is so critical to the success of the play. The three made a first-rate ensemble, and singling one out for praise over the others would be both unnecessary and untruthful.
Tamara Van Bakel as Bessie, Nicole Wahl as Alice, Shelly Meichenbaum as Margaret -- all three were superb, Van Bakel brought great energy to her portrayal of the doctor. Wahl was a thorough spitfire in the scene where she confronted her mother, the anger more effective as she flung defiance at the much taller figure of Meichenbaum. And Meichenbaum herself captured most effectively the loneliness which made her an ideal victim, and the fear and unease as her husband rushed her through the business of going to a doctor, making a will, and handing him her money (Margaret was the last and swiftest of the three murders, her husband killing her when they had been married for one day).
One of the more gruesome details of the murder stories was the fact that, after each killing, the husband went down to the harmonium in the parlour and played. Of course -- Nearer, My God to Thee, (This was just before the sinking of the Titanic gave rise to a legend about that hymn which has grown legs of its own, even in James Cameron's otherwise impeccably researched film). The three women first sing it in the middle of the play, again in an exaggerated cartoonish manner which is especially memorable for Margaret's horribly tone-deaf singing that manages to wander through every key of the harmonic universe in 3.2 seconds, a feat I would have thought impossible.
But then at the end, they joined in the hymn again -- simply, beautifully, in lovely and well-balanced three-part harmony. A symbol, perhaps, of order restored with the execution of Mr. Murderer? I don't know. But to me it was a symbol of hope: the hope that these three women found peace in death, and that changing times may help to ensure that no one else ever suffers their fate.
No comments:
Post a Comment