‘The Extinction Therapist’: Birth of a great play
Great plays, especially new ones, can seem so vanishingly rare that they make you think of endangered species, and in the case of “The Extinction Therapist” you will be thinking of endangered species anyway.
When such plays do come around it’s like seeing a baby white rhino being born or finding a hooded grebe on your birdfeeder when you thought there were none left. It fills one with such glandular excitements as: hope, wonder, appreciation of beauty, un-aloneness and, oh, did we say hope?
Yes, even hope! And hope even though, in the case of “The Extinction Therapist,” there is a small but glowing red EXIT sign brooding in the dark at the back of the stage — beyond the foreground furniture and even beyond the mysterious jungle like botany at the stage’s mid depth.
The “EXIT” sign is at the very back, beyond the lush vegetation, and it is there all play long, like the single eye of a predator glowing in the dark of a forest, distant but never going away.
The sign is one small grace note among many in a play full of both small and enormous grace notes, thematic swells, subtleties, details of perfect aptness and billows of laughter and poignancy.
You will think of endangered species and species already extinct because the characters include a TRex, a woolly mammoth, a shorteared shrew and a smallpox virus. There are also, among the characters, members of that most frightfully endanger-ING of species and you know who you are.
“The Extinction Therapist,” rapturously well written by Calgary playwright Clem Martiini, places these characters together in a group-therapy session run by Dr. Dennis Marshall. Periodically through the action, the scene cuts away from the therapy to Dennis’s homelife with partner Joan to reveal he has struggles of his own.
The fabulist “otherness” of the zoological characters falls away quickly as their compellingly relatable feelings and fears, their specific complexities, emerge.
There is Rebecca Northan, at once lusty and vulnerable, as the wistful, flirtatious woolly mammoth who so badly wants to find a mate and feel sexual/romantic connection. Christopher Stanton, engagingly non-threatening, as the insecure, misunderstand apex predator who resents the pressure of being typecast as “biggest.”
Karen Ancheta brings marvellous physical energy and hair trigger emotional turns to her role as the short-eared shrew. Brandon McGbbon is a sleazy delight as an out-of-his-depth environment minister. And, as the chief vector of the play’s infectiously manic dark humour (pun intended), Anand Rajaram is an standout as the straitjacketed, wild-eye smallpox virus.
For me, the most lingering performance is Richard Clarkin’s as the doctor; he plays the understated “straight man” with such judicious restraint that when his harder truth gradually emerges you see the harness strained just ever so to release hidden depths and power of feeling.
But it’s more than superb acting. There are astonishingly beautiful set pieces that arrest your senses in a kind of hypnotic stillness, such as the tiny orb of light that is passed from character to character, sustained on the slightest breath.
There are others, such as the confetti of the minister’s “lie” post-its, and sudden transformations of the stage ambience with lighting and material effects. The revelations, and there are some, get worked organically into the action for maximum payload.
Each of the moving parts in the clockworks of this play coheres so satisfyingly with every other that we’re pulled into a self-complete communion of meaning, action and feeling.
“The Extinction Therapist” is an absolute triumph. It is a rare great play, inspiringly directed by Christine Brubaker and the show I saw, opening night last week, was the play’s world premiere.
What a coup for Theatre Aquarius and a tribute to artistic director Mary Francis Moore’s vision. A world premiere and one of such strength, with a spontaneous standing ovation from a youthful full house.
The hope the play leaves us with is not a glib, easy one. Death, the eye in the dark, is coming, we’re reminded. Coming for us all. But we ARE capable of change.
On until Feb. 11. Call 905-5227529.