Munro’s mastery speaks for itself in verbatim theatre piece
Alice Munro Stories Where: Belfry Theatre When: To May 14 Rating: four stars (out of five)
It took a few minutes — maybe 10 — for Alice Munro Stories to grab me. But once you’re hooked, well … you’re in hook, line and bookmark.
This project, which had its world première Thursday night, is a different kind of venture for the Belfry Theatre. Taking its cue from San Francisco’s Word for Word company, which specializes in literary theatre, the premise is simple. Two stories by Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro, one of the world’s best short-story writers, are acted out. It’s verbatim theatre, so we hear each and every word, although one of the stories does have extra dialogue tacked on.
My initial impression was that Differently, the first offering, began unpromisingly. The director, Anita Rochon, has added a significant twist. A middle-aged husband reads a story to his depressed wife (she has a vacant, blank affect) who’s lying in a hospital bed. Then the hospital staff — a doctor, nurses — take turns reading. Even the patient becomes a reader.
This is not in the original story. It struck me as a self-conscious touch, a case of the director declaring: “Here I am!” Yet after five or 10 minutes it all started to work. Munro’s story drew us in fully, completely. The words became theatre. And it reminded us that theatre is, after all, nothing more than storytelling.
Differently is about a woman recalling a painful chapter from her youth. She once lived in Victoria (the familiar place names — Oak Bay, Clover Point — resound wonderfully on stage). There she made friends with another young woman who was seemingly a free spirit.
On the surface, they and their husbands socialized like any middle-class couples of the 1960s. There were dinners and lunches; the women appeared to be dutiful wives deferring to their decent, dull husbands. A different world simmered underneath. There were torrid affairs with motorcycle riders, deceptions, betrayals, break-ups.
With this story and one that follows, Save the Reaper, Munro probes ever deeper, unflinching, peeling back layers with a terrible honesty that’s practically terrifying.
No one, including the protagonist, escapes unscathed. The text is incredibly rich; the human experience is dissected with the steely-eyed mastery and depth of a Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekov or Georgia O’Keeffe.
And Rochon’s hospital device does work. Her framing makes Differently more theatrical and, importantly, gives resonance to the protagonist’s devastating observation: We seem to live our lives oblivious to the fact we will all die one day.
Of the two tales, Save the Reaper is inherently more theatrical, more dramatic. A woman takes her grandchildren on a country drive. Somehow she becomes ensnared in misadventure. She takes a wrong turn and they find themselves in a strange house full of inebriated miscreants — it’s like a nightmarish Pinter play or the opening sequence of Forensic Files.
They manage to escape unscathed. However, the grandmother foolishly extends an invitation that cracks open the door to danger. This error in judgment seems symbolic of not only a life lived recklessly, but the dark primal urges that bubble underneath the fables we tell ourselves about middle-class decency and order.
In Save the Reaper the grandmother and kids travel in an “automobile” that’s an assemblage of car seats on wheels — it works very well. So does the wonderful noir-ish lighting by Alan Brodie. In this story we especially benefited from superior performances delivered by Caroline Gillis as the grandma and Jenny Wasko-Paterson as an ominous young hitchhiker.
Alice Munro Stories is, of course, the very definition of textdriven theatre. It won’t be for everyone. Nonetheless, I think few who attend will be disappointed — indeed, most will be pleasantly surprised by this potent and compelling double-bill.