Quirky, charming play has potential, but lacks structure
The Best Plan for Living Happily 1/2 (out of 4) Written by Julia Lederer, directed by Aurora Stewart de Pena. Until April 23 at Videofag, 187 Augusta Ave. bestplanplay.brownpapertickets.com
Violet (Julia Lederer) is going through a rough time. Her parents think it’s a quarter-life crisis, “which is optimistic,” she quips, because she’s 29.
Her best friend Linda (Rebecca Applebaum) is getting married and has turned into Bridezilla, leaning on Violet to move from the “Good Friends I Actually Like” to the “Random Leftover High School People” table at the reception because she’s so obsessed with the room’s social feng shui.
Thanks to her otherwise unstimulating job at the department of anthropology at U of T, she’s recently encountered Plato’s allegory of the cave — his famous theory that our lives are mere shadows on the wall of an ideal world elsewhere — and has fixated on it as a talismanic potential solution to what increasingly comes across as a crushing bout of depression.
Despite Linda’s sensible interjection that “Plato is an ancient philosopher, not a life coach,” Violet joins the Toronto Caving Society where she meets-cute with the sweet, tolerant divorcé (Michael Eisner) who rather too conveniently falls for her.
For the 90-minute play’s last half- hour, the pair find themselves in a drippy cave just north of Barrie, Ont., where time starts to move rather differently than in real life and all the socks that Violet ever lost in the dryer magically reappear.
Welcome to the world of Julia Lederer, a writer with a delightfully quirky voice who is — from the evi- dence of this play — caught in a bind about how best to express it. She’s totally quotable (I’ve just scratched the surface here), but this play is all over the place. It’s made up, in part, of a series of two-person exchanges that, in Aurora Stewart de Pena’s awkward production, are delivered in a flat televisual naturalism that doesn’t quite capture the script’s unique tone.
Part of the problem is that all the characters sound the same: Linda and the caver, along with Violet, are Lederer’s mouthpieces. For the rest of the play, she’s onstage talking to herself and the audience, and her gawky thoughtfulness is winning, but there is very little chemistry between her and Applebaum and, particularly damaging, with Eisner, who’s a decade too young for his role.
Stewart de Pena hasn’t come up with a clear strategy to deal with the long, narrow playing area at Videofag and so we spend too much time watching the actors move blocks around during scene changes.
Julia Lederer is a writer with a delightfully original voice who seems to be caught in a bind about how best to express it
The use of hand-animated projections to indicate locations such as the Bat Cave at the ROM is clever and adds texture to an uber-low-budget indie esthetic (the co-production is by Birdtown & Swanville and QuestionMark Exclamation Theatre).
At once the strongest and most problematic aspect of this production is that Lederer’s right at the centre of it, and it’s hard not to read the crisis communicated in the play as the strangulated articulation of an artist caught at a professional crossroads.
She could go in the direction of solo work, a long tradition including Spalding Gray, Laurie Anderson and, more currently, Christopher Brett Bailey in the U.K.). Or she could fall in with a sensitive dramaturge who could help her find the best structures to express her particular voice. There’s so much potential here.