Generalized generation

‘A PARADE OF DISAGREEABLY DULL PEOPLE, WITH INTERMITTENT FLASHES OF WIT’

THEATRE REVIEW THE MILLENNIAL MALCONTENT Tarragon Theatre, Toronto

‘What cloying meat is love, when matrimony’s the sauce to it!”

That’s the opening line of The Provoked Wife, a prime Restoration comedy by John Vanbrugh. “Marriage sucks.” That, the same sentiment more tersely expressed, is the opening line of The Millennial Malcontent, a new play by Erin Shields.

The resemblance isn’t accidental. The new piece from Shields is avowedly based on Vanbrugh’s old one. It’s modernized of course, the style-and-status society of the late 17th century is replaced by the style-and-status society of the early 21st. Also, the genders have largely been reversed. The disgruntled spouse of the earlier play is Sir John Brute whose name, as usual in this genre, reveals his nature. His contemporary equivalent is a lady named Moxy, and she gets the play off to an explosive start. She’s a year married, and sick of it. Her primary complaint is that her husband is too nice, too goodnatured and too healthy in his habits; as she informs us: “He wakes with the sun to go for his run, shower and skip off to his unpaid internship.” That last detail is beautifully placed. The whole opening monologue, as delivered by Liz Peterson, gets the play off to a brilliant start.

It isn’t sustained. There are other good speeches — Rong Fu, playing a virginal vegan called Faith who has fallen for Moxy’s unavailable Johnny, has a delectable soliloquy, lamenting her loneliness and dreaming of how she and her beloved might “watch a snow storm bury our doublelocked bikes down below.” (Oh yes, the play is set in Toronto.) Even better is the account by Johnny’s friend Heartfree, the only character to retain his Restoration name, of how it feels to be in a bar when a female singersongwriter “with a powerful voice” sings a satiric song about how awful men are. What’s a sensitive guy to do? “If I laugh along, it’s like I’m appropriating their oppression.” James Daly plays Heartfree, his third notable performance this season. In a play that aspires to coolness even while satirizing it, he’s the one actor in consistent command of both timing and understatement.

Frank Cox-O’Connell certainly has timing, and understatement is something for which his role hardly calls. He plays Charm, a compulsive self-videographer with, he claims, thousands of followers. He’s a male version of the original’s Lady Fancyfull, a jealous narcissist, though he might also pass for an update of Lord Foppington, the super-dandy of Vanbrugh’s other major play, The Relapse. He sets his heart, such as it is, on Teazel, a woman who has subjected him to the ultimate humiliation: she’s unfriended him. So he wants to humiliate her in return, by winning her and dumping her. But he decides that she has set her heart on Heartfree, and he sets out to expose them.

His is about the only plot the play has. Shields can’t make Vanbrugh’s narrative work for her, perhaps because he invented his to fit his characters while she has to do it the other way around. Vanbrugh’s story was firmly planted in his own society, but the faults and foibles he depicted were eternal. Shields has the same foibles, but as her clumsy title suggests, she’s out to pin them on millennials. So everything gets blamed on video games and social media and a generation’s addiction to them; which by now is a lazy generalization.

It’s notable that there are no Brutes in Shields’ castlist; the character-names —Faith, Charm, Moxy — are at worst neutral, at best complimentary. Perhaps this is meant to denote a demographic with a flattering image of itself, but it emphasizes a difference between the new play and its source. Lady Brute, Sir John’s provoked wife, is trapped in a marriage from which she cannot escape. Johnny, the provoked husband who refuses to be provoked, is in no such predicament. Nothing really is at stake. So there’s a lot that feels like padding. Moxy, who likes to go on drunken rampages, invades the wedding of two people to whom neither she nor we have been introduced. She and a friend, looking for fancy-dress fun on Nuit Blanche (remind me to keep avoiding it) gang up on a man who’s come dressed as a penis, and he runs terrified through the auditorium. That’s the firstact climax. It might even be funny if we had the faintest idea who the man was.

Vanbrugh himself wasn’t always the neatest playbuilder, but he did much better than this. Peter Hinton, who a few years ago directed a wonderfully lucid production of a fearsomely complicated Restoration comedy, The Way of the World, hasn’t managed to impose any shape or tension on this one. It becomes a parade of disagreeably dull people, with intermittent flashes of wit. At the end it goes surprisingly sentimental, with a view of marriage starrier-eyed that anything from the 1600s.

Or maybe we’re not meant to take it seriously and Shields is attempting the impossible: being ironic about irony.

CYLLA VON TIEDEMANN Rong Fu, Natasha Mumba and Liz Peterson in The Millennial Malcontent. The play just can’t sustain a brilliant start, Robert Cushman writes.