Honesty helps keep millennial play grounded
To get the obvious out of the way: The title of Erin Shields’ new play at Tarragon Theatre, The Millennial Malcontent, is intentionally cheesy.
It almost begs a fellow millennial (I happen to be one) to pull a muscle rolling their eyes.
A riff on The Provoked Wife, a 1697 comedy by John Vanbrugh, The Millennial Malcontent hearkens back to “restoration comedy,” with its drawing rooms, fans, wigs, mistaken identities and farce, that’s far too broad for our modern, ironic tastes. Or perhaps we’ve read one too many think pieces that place us as the butt of the joke or the scapegoat to society’s problems that even the use of the M-word in a play title gets the millennial’s defences up.
All of which is to say the title belies the sensitivity with which Shields treats her characters.
Although they’re written broadly enough to fit into the restoration comedy style, there is something refreshing about seeing the lives of 20and 30-somethings not (always) played for jokes.
The underlying theme makes it clear that, although unpaid internships at non-profits, painstaking personal projects in niche areas of art, or vegan and gluten-free diets enabled by neighbourhood farmers’ markets are easy fodder for jokes, they can hide a deeper sense of loneliness in a world with challenging economic prospects, heightened by the rise of digital platforms of communication.
These issues are starting to take up more space in theatre seasons, in ways that go beyond the earlier trend of “updating” classics by sticking phones in characters’ hands and projecting YouTube clips over the stage, and Shields’s concepts are helped here by understated direction from Peter Hinton, using video projections by Howard Davis only at key moments.
Even when The Millennial Malcontent seems like it’s relying too much on stereotypes and easy gags, moments of (albeit cynical) honesty keep it grounded. Usually these come from the show’s protagonist, Moxy (Liz Peterson, an always interesting indie dancer and performer making her Tarragon debut, as are many of the young, promising cast).
Shields’s adaptation takes The Provoked Wife’s story about a virtuous wife driven to infidelity by her wayward husband and switches the genders. So it’s a morose, self-sabotaging wife, Moxy, driving her “nice guy” husband Johnny (Reza Sholeh), who enjoys the praise he gets for being emotionally open with friends, into the arms of Faith (Rong Fu), a foodie/ travel/meditation entrepreneur.
Meanwhile, Johnny’s friend Charm (Frank Cox-O’Connell), a self-obsessed YouTube star, falls in love with Teasel (Natasha Mumba), a PhD student studying identity performance on social media, after she reams him out for his elaborate act. But there’s a mutual attraction between Teasel and Heartfree (James Daly), Johnny’s best friend who hosts his own music podcast, so Charm and his Quebecois cousin Mimi (Amelia Sargisson) attempt to foil their romance.
It all comes to a head when Moxy and Raz (Alicia Richardson), a lesbian performance artist/computer programmer, unleash for a night on the town and take out their frustrations with life on an unsuspecting wedding reception and another poor bro in a penis costume (we said Hinton was showing some restraint, but he’s still Peter Hinton after all).
Charm and Mimi feel especially well-suited for the heightened appeal of a restoration comedy. Sargis- son and Cox-O’Connell have fun chemistry as the play’s villain and his smaller henchman.
And the character of Charm — with elaborate costumes, fluid physicality and the play’s most obvious performance of a dishonest identity — is a perfect dandy.
(Congrats go to set and costume designer Joanna Yu; there’s lots of eye candy in this show).
It’s satisfying to see Charm’s defences fall when he’s called out and pleasingly amusing when he inevitably falls for the person he claims to hate, who is the only person to recognize his true self.
Moxy’s also the picture of someone disappointed with reality as compared to how she pictured her life in her mind. (“I thought a wedding would feel like something; that I would vibrate with life and beauty and people would say: ‘Look at her vibrate with life and beauty,’” she says in her opening monologue.)
She’s also bored with the ease and accessibility with which she can find a husband, make a home, make cocktails in fancy glasses or express her personality with black jeans and a Yoko Ono T-shirt.
So she instead gives herself speed bumps by alienating those around her. These are highlights where other characters come off as more shallow, although Shields puts in plenty of clever twists on her original source material, generally.
One hopes that eventually these types of characters and issues can be the main action of a play without putting the name of the generation in the title. They’ll just be people, not representations. In the words of millennial icon Lena Dunham, “Be the voice of my generation, or at least a voice of a generation.”