Powerful play revels in deceptive simplicity
Sometimes a playwright has too much to say in a script, but that’s far better than having too little. And that is why Andrew Kushnir’s Wormwood, which opened at Tarragon Theatre on Wednesday night, may be a bit of a hot mess. But it’s a fascinating and ultimately compelling one.
A member of the Ukrainian-Canadian diaspora, Kushnir has long been fascinated by his heritage and admits that the “Orange Revolution” of 2004 brought many of his feelings to the boiling point.
He imagines a story of a Ukrainian-Canadian named Ivan, not unlike himself, who comes to Ukraine during that election time, ostensibly as a political observer, but, more realistically, in search of his true roots.
For most of the play’s first act, you’re convinced that is all that’s on the agenda, with the addition of a not-very-convincing romance with a strange young woman named Arte- misia. There’s a lot of broadly comic hi-jinx involving Luke Humphrey’s feckless Ivan and the crazy family of Ben Campbell as a positively Tolstoy-esque wide-eyed professor, Nancy Palk as a magisterially putupon housekeeper and Amy Keating as a sweetly befuddled daughter.
It’s all highly theatrical and a lot of fun, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Then Ivan meets Artemesia (not unlike Harry meeting Sally), love is in the air and we drift off into intermission thinking we know what the play is about. Wrong. Act II turns all our preconceptions on their head and plays out with a profound savagery that will often make you sit bolt upright in your seat.
Scott Wentworth is the key. He starts the evening as a genial narrator whose charm is immense, even though you suspect there’s a razor blade hidden inside the apple he’s offering you. By the time we reach the second act, his character unfolds with true complexity. The depth of what Kushnir is trying to tell us begins to hit home. It’s powerful stuff. As revelations keep unfolding and grief piles upon grief, it’s possible to lose track of what Kushnir is trying to tell us. It’s much more than a romance, or a story about Ukrainian identity; it’s about how mankind destroys itself and what it takes to survive in this pitiless world.
Richard Rose directs with panache and Camellia Koo’s setting is splendid in its deceptive simplicity.
As mentioned, Wentworth, Camp- bell, Palk and Keating are all splendid. Humphrey continues to impress me as Canada’s Matt Damon, the goto guy when you need a decent hero who wants to do the right thing. Unfortunately, Chala Hunter seems a bit artificial as Artemisia, a character so literary she needs all the humanizing she can get.
Still, I found myself always interested and often moved throughout Wormwood.
Kushnir is a writer with a fine turn of phrase and Wentworth, in particular, dispenses his prose with magisterial eloquence.
Yet, in the end, I wasn’t quite sure what I was meant to feel and what the point of the whole complex exercise was.
Like a James Bond martini, I emerged shaken, not stirred.