Play almost brand new
Between the Sheets
★★ (out of 4) By Jordi Mand. Directed by Kelly Thornton. Until Oct. 7 at Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, 30 Bridgman Ave. 416-5311827.
The play about the wronged wife confronting her husband’s lover is like Chanel’s little black dress. It never goes out of fashion and you can always dress it up with trendy accessories that almost make it seem brand new. Almost.
That’s how I felt about Between the Sheets, which opened the Nightwood Theatre Season at the Tarragon Extra Space on Thursday night. Despite all the advance talk about how it was a moving and relevant look at contemporary relationships, I kept feeling that I had seen it all before in black and white on Turner Classic Movies. From the moment Susan Coyne strode into a Grade 3 classroom, wearing boots and looking like Joan Crawford at her most demonic, I knew we were in for some first-rate scenery chewing and that’s what we got.
As the mother coming late to a parent-teacher conference for her 8 year-old son, Coyne blazes with such malevolence toward teacher Christine Horne that when we soon find out the younger woman is sleeping with the older one’s husband, it’s no surprise. From the barely-bottled rage Coyne splashes around, you’d think Horne was responsible for 9/11, or at least the mishaps on the grassy knoll.
All the ingredients for the kind of play I thought had vanished long ago are present, although instead of a packet of illicit perfumed letters, we get a folder of soft-porn emails between the teacher and her pupil’s father that mommy has found and printed up.
Just when you’re wondering what playwright Jordi Mand or director Kelly Thornton could possibly have been thinking of, the trendiness begins. The little boy isn’t just any average student. He sounds like he’s suffering from incipient autism, a fact his mother denies and only the teacher understands.
Then we get into long tirades about women who choose their jobs over their families and unfulfilled man-children who flee from responsibility, while hoping that a mid-life affair with someone half their age will revitalize them.
After a while you want to echo Polonius and sigh “‘Tis true, ‘tis pity and pity ‘tis, ‘tis true,” but then, realizing she might be losing our attention, Mand comes swooping in from left field with a melodramatic medical back story for our poor young teacher. Yes, it’s grim and nothing to be mocked, but it also seems a woefully convenient way of jacking up the dramatic temperature. You get a few epigrams that even Barbara Cartland might have squirmed at (“Being left and being left alone are very different things,”) and then, just when you think it’s about to end, Coyne hurls a hand grenade of over-the-top vengeance into the room that destroys any sympathy you might have been starting to feel for her. For the record, Christine Horne gives an amazing performance, combining a kind of tensile strength with a totally convincing vulnerability. When she has to deal with the medical melodrama Mand gives her, she carries it off brilliantly. And Susan Coyne, when she’s not channelling the spirit of 1930s trash romance, has some wonderfully real and touching moments. I know this is when I’m supposed to hail the arrival of a new playwright, but that’s hard to do when a lot of her writing is like bad Terence Rattigan filtered though an episode of Oprah Winfrey. Between the Sheets is only an hour long, but during that time, it manages to be both too much and not enough.