A repetitive and predictable flashback
Forward-moving time doesn’t really exist. All events happen at the speed of light and therefore simultaneously.
This is one of the many complex ideas in The Message, Jason Sherman’s play about the renowned Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan.
It’s glibly tempting to say that the play’s production history bears out this premise: it was meant to open Tarragon Theatre’s 2003 season, but the McLuhan estate objected to some of its content.
Fifteen years later, Sherman is again Tarragon’s playwright-inresidence and is finally getting its world premiere, directed by the theatre’s artistic director (then and now), Richard Rose. R.H. Thomson as McLuhan barely moves from the centre of a stage that routinely revolves around him.
Arguably, the entire play is taking place in McLuhan’s imagination on the night he died, Dec. 31, 1980. The same exchange between McLuhan and his assistant Margaret (Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster) is repeated over and over.
They’re in his Centre for Culture and Technology office at the University of Toronto in the late 1960s, after his controversial brain surgery. He’s lucid, but periodically not.
We’re also in the McLuhans’ home close to his death; he can only articulate a few words. Former students and associates arrive to pay homage, cueing flashbacks.
Margaret is still revolving, as is devoted Texan wife Corinne (Sarah Orenstein). The real Co- rinne was infuriated by the portrayal of her in the 2003 version as, according to estate agent Matie Molinaro, “one of those wives who keep on asking her husband when he’s coming home for dinner.”
There’s no dinner nagging in this updated version, but the character still exists only in relation to her husband.
The play’s circular structure seems intended to demonstrate McLuhan’s ideas about time, but it doesn’t really. Things don’t happen simultaneously; they happen over and over again, and the 100-minute production becomes repetitive and predictable.
Thomson is a superb actor in bravura form, particularly in several late monologues, but the play’s continued return to McLuhan’s personal communication struggles tries patience.
There isn’t much new, in fact, in this “great man flashes back late in life” dramaturgical approach: think Amadeus, Barrymore, Shadowlands, Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love. It’s a way to engage in mythologization.
Sherman is clearly fascinated by McLuhan’s ideas, and he does a good job of unpacking some of them.
Many notable things about McLuhan are referenced: his devout Catholicism, his love of puns, his rivalry with Northrop Frye, his obsession with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. But because the play keeps circling around events in McLuhan’s life rather than digging deep, this comes across like biographical tourism.
The aspect of McLuhan’s career that most fascinates Sherman is how his ideas were taken on by advertising and used (with his co-operation) to make him famous, even though he was attempting to expose electronic media and advertising as forms of control. The play doesn’t do much to elucidate this paradox either.
And it’s the premise on which we are served up an appalling scene set in a San Francisco topless restaurant featuring a woman (Lancaster) wearing pasties and stars-and-stripes go-go shorts, serving cigars and cigarettes to fully clothed men.
The men have lots to do. Orenstein and Lancaster are sorely underused because no matter which of several characters they’re each playing, they’re only there to serve a male narrative and, at the production’s worst, the male gaze.
Camellia Koo’s design is uncharacteristically flimsylooking. Charlotte Dean’s costumes uncharacteristically obvious.
The theatrical medium here rebels against the message.