CONVERSATION AND CONNECTION
Varscona’s latest is vintage Lemoine
Playwright Stewart Lemoine has a knack for the balance of sadness and silly. In his best work, award-winners such as Pith or Witness to a Conga, he is able to move the audience on a tide of energy created through rapid-fire dialogue and pace, arcane characters, and the audience’s giddy acceptance of the ride. When we are nearly out of breath, Lemoine deposits us somewhere solemn for a bit of a think about life’s common difficulties.
Lemoine brings that successful and popular technique to his latest effort at the Varscona. The new play, launching the 2018 Teatro la Quindicina season, is called The Finest of Strangers. Featuring a rollicking cast of eight, the play is predictably chock-a-block with Lemoineisms. When people aren’t delivering anachronisms including “hard cheese on you, Bruce,” they are enraptured by elixirs, or pondering why magic fairies keep showing up in the closet. It is all good fun, but it also delivers a powerful dramatic punch.
The Finest of Strangers opens with Bruce Faraday (Jeff Haslam) perched uncomfortably on the couch of Mavis Craig (Patricia Darbasie in her debut role with Teatro). Bruce is a well-known television journalist who is on a personal mission. He wants to write a story about people who revisit their childhood homes. He would like to start with Mavis’ house in High River, because he lived there, briefly, as a six-year-old boy, along with his recently-widowed mother.
Mavis, also a widow, is happy to be part of the story. But things take an unexpected turn when Bruce, attempting to rise from the couch and leave the house with the promise to return with a cameraman, finds himself pinned in place. His legs will support him, but they just don’t want to move. A short time later, Mavis finds herself gripped by the same affliction. Apparently, they are meant to stay in the house and connect to a series of ghosts from the house’s past.
Did I mention the ghosts were musical? They sing in thrilling,
multi-part harmony, they play the piano, they belt out the odd charmingly dirty ditty. (Lemoine knows we are suckers for a dirty ditty.) Soon, the audience finds the door to its heart creaking open, ready to ponder the imponderable. If we could connect with a dead loved one, what would we say? And what reaction could be expected from that exchange? Would all be resolved, or would the experience prove frustrating? I, for one, cannot get enough of the thorny questions disguised as parlour games that Lemoine is so good at. I have at least three loved ones that died before I could tell them something really important. I have often wondered what they would say to my revelations, should we meet again, and I have run the scenarios a number of times, trying to get it right.
The question is, how effective is The Finest of Strangers at doing that work, playing that game, for the audience? Does it take us where we need to go?
Certainly, the cast, made up primarily of longtime Teatro regulars, has worked together long enough for its chemistry to gel nicely, an advantage to be sure. When Auntie Marj (Leona Brausen) mistakes Bruce for the boy he once was, and tackles him with tickles, the comic connection is, as ever, delightful. At the same time, it was refreshing to witness fresh sparks emerging between Haslam and Teatro newbie Darbasie. The latter brings a wry self-knowledge to her performance, and fully inhabits the role of a widow in transition.
Cathy Derkach as Victoria, Bruce’s depressed mother, has perhaps the most challenging role, but also one that provides the most potential for revelation. As a mother emotionally disconnected from her child, she plays outside the comfortable stereotype of devoted. We can see the impact this has on her son, and also recognize how powerless either of them was to do anything about that situation.
“... All of us wish we knew more than we do ... and also much less,” notes Victoria during a gut-wrenching, otherworldly exchange with her son.
The truth may set us free, or it may send us reeling. The Finest of Strangers encourages us to seek resolution, without imagining we will find it. It promotes action, rather than giving in to paralysis.
“We’re unlikely to find the answer by simply thinking,” says Victoria in a compelling comment. If I had two things to suggest about this play, it would be to edit, and to edit again. Lemoine delights in a large and mischievous cast. But the magic fairy Clio (in an over-the-top performance by Michelle Diaz) gets in the way of characters who are able to do their own work quite nicely, thank you. Victoria’s rambling soliloquy about how she met her husband seemed a struggle for Derkach, and that probably wasn’t her fault.
Still, all in all, The Finest of Strangers is a play that leads to conversation, and connection, and that seems to be the point with Lemoine. Amid the ear candy, and the silly songs, there is much to ponder on the way home. As Bruce says with simple eloquence: “It’s good to wonder about things.”