Eccentric play rewards the adventurous
Taking a chance on small indie theatre shows in the winter can reward you with a treasure trove of talent. For actors who take up contracts at the major summer festivals in cottage and wine country, the months from November to January are like summer vacation — the time to break out of the programming they’re used to and experiment.
Right now, in one of the tiniest new performance spaces in Toronto — The Commons Theatre, located unassumingly above the storefronts near College and Bathurst — adventurous Toronto theatregoers can, on its very last day, experience an eccentric production from Theatre Animal, a new indie theatre company comprised of personalities known primarily from the Shaw Festival. After last year’s production of
Grimly Handsome by Julia Jarcho at the Assembly Theatre, Theatre Animal returns with director Jay Turvey and actors Jeff Irving and Julia Course — all current staples of the Shaw Festival — in Obie Award-winning playwright Erin Courtney’s 2006 self-help inspired play Alice the Magnet.
With the two productions back to back, this particular group of artists has shown a knack for choosing scripts that are virtually the opposite of the well-made-plays of summer fests — they’re odd, tonally amorphous and unpredictable in a way that makes the audience feel unmoored.
In Alice the Magnet, Catherine McGregor is Alice, a self-help entrepreneur who calls herself a “magnet of positivity.”
With a perfect bob and soothing, gauzy scarf (excellent costumes all around by Christine Urquhart), McGregor’s Alice is so practised in her speeches about her “ACT” system (Acknowledge, Confess, reveal your Truth) that, when combined with the inherent skepticism of 2018, puts the audience on edge.
Immediately after, we meet Louise — a high-school teacher on the tail end of a bender having a breakdown in the middle of an art lesson. Louise is a mess, but Course is such a charming actor that we’re intrigued.
She plays up Louise’s clownish aspects, including walking in two-inch-heeled boots like a baby deer, so the audience isn’t threatened by her crisis, and even excited for the next time it comes to blows.
Louise finds work as a temp at Alice’s company, managed by Alice’s assistant John (Irving), a type-A strategist with a sleeping disorder. All of John’s office supplies are in matching black, the colour of his slicked-back hair (with a telling cowlick in the back doing its own thing — the flaw in the pristine image as a constant reminder that he’s losing control, especially with Louise’s arrival).
Soon after Louise joins the company, her former student Arthur (Cameron Grant) quits school and becomes Alice’s new intern.
Following her intuitions about her new hires, Alice promotes them as she changes her system to focus less on individual betterment and more on changing society in general, until a brutal event upsets the balance and these characters find themselves rising to or running away from their challenges.
Courtney’s play might begin like a straightforward comedy that spoofs 2018’s obsession around self-care, oversharing and individualism (pretty presciently, since it was written 12 years ago), but it doesn’t stay in that realm for long.
As one storyline ventures into solemn drama, another escalates into absurdity and it’s all advanced with dramatic Vivaldi and original compositions by Paul Sportelli.
Jay Turvey keeps his directorial hand hidden, leaving the impression that these characters are on their own rollercoaster ride, offering few guideposts for the audience.
The accident that changes the story’s trajectory happens offstage and, in this production, barely registers in the action — we only hear a description from Alice later on.
What’s more, the characters almost refuse to act as we expect them to — John drops his devotion to Alice and cool demeanour, Louise takes on responsibility in a scary way, Arthur makes a bold move to save Alice’s project, and Alice, the biggest surprise of all, never loses her earnestness. With a 180degree turn in her convictions, the audience learns that she was never faking it in the first place.
What the play has to say about groupthink, false idols, and the nature of humanity is less interesting than trying to figure out what Courtney’s characters are trying to do and what tone she and Turvey are trying to hit, and that’s sometimes a confusing task.
Then again, I felt similarly offkilter watching last year’s Grimly Handsome, and after a year of mostly well-made plays, I look back fondly at that adventurous discomfort.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Alice the Magnet has the same effect in the long term.