Love and/or death
In Flesh and Other Fragments of Love, a couple happens upon a corpse and indulges in some explanatory acting
There is a particular kind of acting that I constantly find myself railing against but for which I have yet to find a satisfactory name. Maybe I should call it explanatory acting. It consists of pumping more emotion into a line or a speech than either the words or the situation behind them can reasonably bear. It’s intended to be passionate but instead sounds merely querulous. It can’t be blamed on lack of talent, since it can crop up in otherwise good performances by good people, though it may well be a sign of lax direction. It can currently be found at the Tarragon in performances by Blair Williams, an actor of proven excellence who indeed has some fine moments here of both wit and pain, and Maria del Mar, who has many film and TV credits but is here making her professional stage debut, in a demanding role; I suspect that anxiety is causing her to overdo some things but when she relaxes she plays with spark and generosity.
They’re appearing in Flesh and Other Fragments of Love, a play by Évelyne de la Chenelière (French-Canadian) derived from a novel by Marie Cardinal (French-French). They play Pierre and Simone, a married couple (from France) vacationing in Ireland in an attempt to repair a fractious and fractured marriage. Pierre goes for a walk on the beach and finds the body of a drowned young woman. He reports back to Simone, who’s jealous of her husband’s apparent fascination with the deceased; they have a theoretically open marriage, with plenty of separations, but it doesn’t seem to work as it’s
supposed to. Simone makes inquiries and finds that the corpse is that of Mary, a medical student who got pregnant, went to New York with her child, then came back home and killed herself. The tones in which Simone relays this information are an especially clear example of the kind of over-emphasis I’m complaining about. She seems, with her inflections rising even higher than her voice, to be blaming Pierre for what she’s telling him. Now it’s true that the two of them go in for blame on a large scale, but this hardly seems to be the moment for it. Psychologically suspect, it’s also theatrically ineffective. There are times — many times — when a simple statement is the most powerful thing an actor can deliver. Enough with the colouring; we just want the facts.
There are times — many times — when a simple statement is the most powerful thing an actor can deliver
We especially want them here, so that there can be some solid ground to a play whose characters are naturalistic but whose action isn’t; at least I find it hard to believe that, even in remote parts of Ireland, the authorities would let a corpse just lie there, festooned in seaweed, as a sort of bizarre tourist attraction. What happens is that Pierre and Simone each engage in a series of imaginary conversations with Mary, reconstructing her life in terms of what they would like to believe about their own; using her, in fact, as a supernatural marriage counsellor. Rich people’s problems, you might think (and if an Anglo playwright were to pull this kind of stunt, you’d probably think it a lot more dismissively). Mary’s situation obviously doesn’t, or didn’t, fall into this category; and she, ironically or not, is the most flesh-and-
blood person in the piece. Nicole Underhay, playing her, has the advantage of a lyrical Irish accent, to give her a local habitation as well as a name, and she sustains it beautifully; she too has been known, in other contexts, to overdrive her roles, but her appearances at the Tarragon always seem to find her at her best and here she is graceful but quite unsentimental; visually otherworldly — in our first glimpse of her prone in the water she looks, in Richard Rose’s production, like an Arthurian heroine as painted by Edward Burne-Jones — but in her feelings very much, and bitterly, of this world.
Still, the play isn’t really about her; and the central couple outstay the interest both of their situation and of the dramatist’s device. It’s not that their relationship isn’t
believable; it is, very, and there are some painfully accurate, even funny passages of mutual recrimination, along with the desperate attempts to cling on to something that may once have existed. Williams’ compromised attempts to assert his independence are especially engaging. He also does some memorable silent suffering at the end, his eyes suffused with terror and regret. By now though the play is making emotional demands that it hasn’t justified and on which the actors, try as they might, cannot collect. That may partly account for why they overdo things earlier; they’re trying to force into the light a drama that exists only in the playwright’s (and maybe the novelist’s) head.
An older Quebec play has been revived by Pleiades Theatre, at Buddies in Bad Times. This is Manon, Sandra and the Virgin Mary, in which Michel
Tremblay reunites characters from two of his still earlier pieces. Well, he doesn’t exactly reunite them; he has them sitting at opposite sides of the stage, engaging in parallel monologues, and converging, and then not physically, only at the end. Stage right in her rocking chair sits the puritanical Manon who, though not a nun, has given her life rigidly to God and has tormenting spasms of doubt as to what she’s got in return; Irene Poole reaches into her mental and emotional centre, though on the way she sometimes … well, go back to where I came in. Richard McMillan, on the other hand and on the other side, is in consummate control, technical and otherwise, of Manon’s spiritual (if that’s the word) opposite: the selfcreated Sandra, né Michel, the drag-queen of Hosanna grown even more scabrous and flamboyant with age, sitting enrobed at his dressingtable, and rhapsodizing about the male organ, his own and as many others as possible. He has fewer regrets than when we last met him, but those he has are choice. Like Manon, though less consistently, he’s obsessed with the image of the play’s third title character, which becomes gradually more visible as John van Burek’s production proceeds. (Van Burek is directing his own excellent translation). Thoughts of the Madonna are what bring Manon and Sandra thematically together: that and some childhood reminiscences. A feeling of regret, of something missed, hangs in the air at the end, but it isn’t as compelling as the monologues, respectively shaming and shameless. So, two plays with a Mary as their third figure and both concerned, at least in passing, with Catholic guilt.
Flesh and Other Fragments of Love runs through Feb. 16 at the Tarragon Theatre; Manon, Sandra and the Virgin Mary runs at Buddies in Bad Times through Feb. 2.