CREATIVE COUPLE PLAY WITH MARRIAGE
On This Day explores the ups and downs of bickering husband and wife
Centaur Theatre has the perfect Valentine’s treat opening next week: a world première about a bickering married couple reassessing what on earth they’re still doing together.
On This Day is a comedy drama which begins with a road accident before exploring a car crash of a marriage. Grace, a mysterious young woman, steps in front of an oncoming car. Sarah and Henry can’t agree on whether they hit her. As they bundle her along to a friend’s birthday party, they can’t seem to agree on anything else either.
“One of my hopes,” says Alain Goulem, director of On This Day, “is that we’ll cause fights between couples when they leave the theatre about who’s right and who’s wrong.”
Hopefully, Goulem won’t end up squabbling with his own wife once the play is over. After all, she wrote it.
Alexandria Haber has been sharing both life and work with Goulem for some twenty- five years, since they met performing with the summer Shakespeare company Repercussion Theatre.
“We did Comedy of Errors where Alex played my mom,” recalls Goulem as the two of them chatted over a coffee during an interview. “And then she played my son in Macbeth.”
In fact, as Haber goes on to explain, it turns out they’d met much earlier than that oddly Freudian pairing.
“We’d acted together when he was 11 and I was 10, though we didn’t know it. We’d been going out for about a year and Al came over to my folks’ house for dinner and spotted a program for children’s theatre. He was like: ‘ Oh wow, Aladdin, I was in that!’ And my mom goes ‘ Really? So was Alex.’ So we flipped through it and there we both were.”
During her first pregnancy ( they now have four kids), Haber turned more toward writing, later winning Infini-théâtre’s Writeon- Q competition with Life Here After, and collaborating with Ned Cox on the hockey- based couples comedy Four Minutes If You Bleed, which played in Centaur’s Brave New Looks slot in 2011.
Goulem, who was last seen at Centaur as a shabby cop in the gruelling thriller Butcher, has turned increasingly to directing. This is his fourth time directing Haber’s plays. He’s usually the first to give her feedback on early drafts too. It’s clear he’s protective of Haber’s words, as indeed a director should be, but he inevitably brings that extra bit of familiarity to the table.
“Alex writes really bang- on dialogue,” Goulem says. “It’s not
written for syntax or grammar. Often there’s a lot of run- on sentences, a lot of strange punctuation. So often actors will try to fix it on the fly. But I always tell them: don’t do that, go find what it would be like as a run- on sentence and don’t add the punctuation.”
He did, however, encounter some resistance from one quarter.
“I was directing Alex in one of her shows called Housekeeping and Homewrecking, when she came to a line and said: ‘ Oh, I’m going to have to rewrite that.’ I was like: ‘ No, try to say it the way you wrote it.’ She was the one actor giving me the most resistance on reading Haber- talk.”
Given Haber’s propensity for writing about couples in crisis, does she find herself filing away the odd phrase for future use should she and Goulem have a tiff ?
“Definitely,” she cheerfully concedes. “I don’t know about word for word, but things will find their way in there somehow.”
“Alex takes liberally from life,” Goulem adds. “Because we’re so close, I recognize more than other people do. I recognize myself for sure. I recognize Alex in almost everything she writes, her acerbic nature, her ability with words to decimate if need be.”
Despite Goulem’s earlier comment about hoping for feuding couples tumbling out of Centaur’s doors, he sees Haber’s depiction of the war between the sexes as more even- handed than might first appear.
“If you take the character of Henry,” he explains, “I really didn’t like him at first. He’s kind of got a wandering eye. And maybe it’s more than just his eye that wanders. But working on it with the actors, we’ve really come to a much more balanced place. Some of those judgments I was putting on about Henry being a shameless, gross, flirty old guy on first read … well, now I’m wondering — maybe his wife is overreacting.”
Haber agrees that On This Day is less about judging between couples, more about exploring what makes them tick.
“Ultimately people act out because they want to be happier than they are,” she says.
“It’s true, Sarah and Henry are a bickering couple, but to my mind it’s more about being distracted. Our generation is rarely ever fully present in the moment or paying attention to what’s right in front of us. How much do we miss? How much does it affect our relationships without us being aware of it? How do we define happiness for ourselves and hold onto it.”
Which brings me to the question of how their marriage can withstand the stresses and strains of theatrical production without undergoing the occasional Strindbergian meltdown.
Haber thinks for a moment. “We play Scrabble a lot when we get home,” she laughs.
Another theatrical couple putting on a show this week is husbandand- wife team Gordon Masten and Jude Beny. Counting the Ways is described as a Valentine’s Vaudeville and consists of a series of snappy sketches exploring love’s fortunes in late middle age. Its author has been there before, most famously with the marriage- of- attrition classic, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. This, though, is Edward Albee in gentler, more playful form. Live music is provided by Ari Snyder. It plays at Huntingdon’s Grove Hall, 165 Châteauguay Rd., Friday and Saturday at 8 p. m., and on Sunday ( Valentine’s Day) at 2 p. m. Tickets are $ 20. For more details, call 514791- 5100 or visit grovehall.ca
Ultimately people act out because they want to be happier than they are.