Anonymity brings honesty to story
Having a play receive its professional premiere is an accomplishment for any playwright, but it’s rare that the writer has no chance to publicly celebrate that achievement. It’s not even clear that the writer of Grace was present at Thursday’s opening night at Streetcar Crowsnest, since no one knows who she is.
Going by Jane Doe officially, she also takes on the moniker of Sarah in the actual play, a role performed by the actor Rose Napoli (all of these levels of false and true identities are laid out early in the script).
“Sarah” introduces her family — her sister Grace (Michaela Washburn), her mother Diane (Brenda Robins) and father Stephen (Conrad Coates). The actors’ names are real, their characters’ names are not — Jane Doe has granted her family’s wishes for anonymity because the play examines the real process that they undertook to press charges against the man who raped Grace when she was 7 years old.
The alleged perpetrator is also kept anonymous, but there is a more abrasive stand-in: a loud blast of white noise whenever that name is supposed to be said out loud.
Grace is equally about the flaws of the criminal justice system when it comes to processing sexual assault cases (this particular case was tried in the U.S., where the assault took place), how the assault affected Grace’s personality and the family as a whole, and about turning this story into a piece of documentary theatre.
Jane Doe draws from case reports, legal definitions, interviews with her family and Grace’s own writing to create the show’s dialogue. And when Napoli directly addresses the audi- ence as Sarah, we know that this is Jane Doe working out her own internal conflicts, experiences and residual trauma in front of us.
There is a deep level of honesty that the play’s anonymity allows, which fortunately focuses on Grace and her family and avoids the details of the assault itself. At a moment when Robins and Napoli discussed the potential harm of airing this story so publicly on Grace and each other — Robins delivering a measured but emotionally charged performance as a lawyer mother who intimately knows the real psychological danger her family is up against, hiding her tears behind darkframed glasses — this critic felt that changing the subject to analyze the play’s artistic merit was unduly cruel.
Then again, as Sarah repeats several times, she does not “want this to be a therapy play.”
Sarah’s role in her own play is not only to facilitate interviews and deliver statistics, but reveal her intentions, tactics and choices in her creation of the play. This meta-narrative at first comes off as a gag, as Sarah describes “this theme that (she’s) interested in” to Grace — the joke being that Sarah’s intellectual curiosity in the parallels between the appearance of truth in theatre and in court feels miles away from Grace’s visceral relationship to the assault. But it occupies a lot of mental space for Sarah’s character.
As charming as Napoli is to watch wrestle with Sarah’s con- flict to be both a good sister and a good playwright, one too many self-aware sidebars get in the way of telling her family’s story.
It’s a common thread in documentary theatre, the creator investigating their own biases and intentional inclusions and omissions, but a story about a sexual assault against a child leaves little moral grey area to be manipulated. In this case, the details of this production’s creation are less compelling than the people who tell it.
Napoli embodies this in her performance as Sarah, containing her post-trial stress and anxiety within Sarah’s continuous self-analysis. She’s brimming with energy, unsure of where to place it. The moment where Sarah lets go — in an imagined confrontation with her sister’s rapist — Napoli unleashes years of pent-up rage in a few minutes. The opening night audience sniffled until curtain call after that.
Washburn, following her Dora Award for her comedic performance as Louis Riel in VideoCabaret’s Confederation and Riel last year, takes a notably gentle and subtle note as Grace, an animal lover and natural writer.
Considering the title of this play, Washburn gives Grace a stoic independence — she might be the person at the centre of the court case, but it isn’t the centre of her. It helps give balance to the entire production, which could easily have turned into an analysis of a survivor, making Grace into a mouthpiece or figurehead.
Grace might not know what kind of play it’s trying to be, but we’re calmed by the kind of person that Grace is.
Carly Maga is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @RadioMaga