TRUE EMOTION
Honest communication, intense sex scenes at centre of play following a woman’s life through her relationships,
Bunny
(out of 4) By Hannah Moscovitch. Directed by Sarah Garton Stanley. Until April 1 at Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, 30 Bridgman Ave. tarragontheatre.com or 416-531-1827 I watched the world premiere of Hannah Moscovitch’s play at Stratford two summers ago sitting next to my Star colleague Carly Maga, and afterward I told her I envied her because she got to review it. Later we named it one of our top 10 shows of 2016, and now I’m the lucky one because it’s being remounted at Tarragon and I have 800 or so delicious, difficult words to try to explain why I think this play and production — superbly directed again by Sarah Garton Stanley — are so great and so important.
The plot, first: It’s the story of Sorrel (Maev Beaty), two hippie-liberal academics’ daughter who found refuge from her youthful unpopularity in Victorian novels. When she blossoms into a beauty at17, she embraces all the new male attention and becomes a “dorky slut,” according to the other girls in school who treat her like an outcast.
The play follows her through her most significant erotic relationships: her high school football-captain boyfriend Justin (Tony Ofori); a married university professor (Cyrus Lane); and her businessman husband, Carol (Matthew Edison).
When I saw the play the first time I was moved and provoked by how fully it focuses on a woman’s inner life and sexuality. Which isn’t to say Sorrel’s unapologetic: she narrates the story in an ongoing, third-person monologue that frequently starts with “Sorrel should probably admit to you that …”
This combination of guilt and brazenness is therefore captured in the play’s form as much as its content.
In a program note, Moscovitch acknowledges that while she had her sensibility shaped by Victorian fiction, her formal inspiration for the play was the work of modernists such as James Joyce, and this is evident in the fractured structure.
The significant erotic relationship I haven’t mentioned yet is one that launches the play: Sorrel, in her late 30s, is paddling in a canoe with a much younger man, Angel (Jesse LaVercombe), and it’s resisting the charge between them that causes her to turn to the audience and start talking. Very nearly the whole play is a series of fragmentary flashbacks happening in the split second in which Sorrel is deciding whether she will or won’t succumb again to carnal pleasure (and whether she does is for us, the audience, to determine).
Stanley’s production brilliantly delivers this sense of the play being told in one breath. Beaty never leaves the stage, with the other performers moving set pieces, and the actors handing Sorrel pieces of costume and sometimes even dressing her. Hers is a magnificently realized performance that captures the character’s paradoxical combination of flighty intelligence, self-reflectiveness and crippling self-doubt.
The honest emotional communication between the performers adds to the intensity, and this includes several hot sex scenes between Sorrel and Lane’s professor, clearly benefiting from intimacy coaching by Siobhan Richardson.
Michael Gianfrancesco’s set design is anchored by a white circle, sometimes illuminated, in a patch of AstroTurf. This, for me, represents the unity that Sorrel is seeking: the sense of coherent self, of simple narrative, of first person.
Like the play itself, I’m dancing here around what’s at the centre of everything: Sorrel’s friendship with Carol’s sister Maggie (Rachel Cairns), who befriends her in college and gives her the aptly ambiguous nickname of Bunny — skittish, scared, sexualized. Cairns’ performance here is luminous.
You could argue that the characters of Maggie and her daughter Lola (Gabriella Albino) are underwritten, and that the moment of big emotional payoff between Maggie and Sorrel comes too late.
I suggest that it’s in these dramaturgical flaws (if you want to call them that) that the heart of the play lies: Sorrel’s self-punishing inability to accept love and intimacy when it’s not sexual. I’ve never seen this dramatized so well, and I suspect it’s the deep resonance of these observations that had the young people behind me holding onto each other in their seats after the show.
Sorrel’s life really begins when the play, and Maggie’s life, ends. “Don’t be scared,” her dear friend says to her. And Bunny turns towards the light.