DOMESTICATED BLISS
Watching Martha Burns and Paul Gross sling fireballs at each other is worth the price of admission,
Domesticated is anything but.
The bile-black comedy by Bruce Norris had its Canadian premiere Thursday night at the Berkeley Street Theatre, in a co-production from the Company Theatre and Canadian Stage. And no matter how open-minded or jaded you think you are, the play is guaranteed to shock you at some point in its two-and-ahalf hours.
Watching Paul Gross and Martha Burns hurl verbal fireballs at each other over intimate issues like fellatio technique and quality of bodily fluids will certainly keep you on the edge of your seat. I mean, they never talked like that on Slings and Arrows.
And the real middle-of-the-road fans who might have wandered in will find themselves muttering “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Due South anymore.”
But is this all to good effect? Yes and no. That’s the problem with the evening. Actually, it’s the problem with the play itself, because there’s nothing at all wrong with this snappy, slick production, directed with panache by Philip Riccio.
Against a sleek set by Nick Blais, lit with nuance by Kevin Lamotte and peopled with cast members clothed to perfection by Ming Wong, we see a world of privilege gone horribly wrong.
Gross plays Bill, a prominent gynecologist and political figure who is living every celebrity’s nightmare. An encounter with a young prostitute somehow ends with the woman in a coma and Bill in front of a microphone, flanked by his stoic wife, Judy, as he tries to apologize to the press.
He does it badly, because, frankly, Bill doesn’t really want to apologize at all. And once he and Judy are in their picture-perfect home, dining with their two daughters, all hell breaks loose.
Well actually, all Burns breaks loose, because for most of the play’s first act, this brilliant actress never stops talking. There’s anger, frustra- tion, disbelief, self-hate, husband-hate, economic calculation and ultimate meltdown. My favourite moment is when — confronted with pages of credit card bills from her husbands sexual dalliances over the years — she calculates the impact of those debts on the fate of the family’s beloved summer getaway.
We also get some fine satire of Oprah- styled TV shows (Akosua Amo-Adem is grand as the showboating host and Sarah Dodd aces as the white-trash mother), Nicola Lipman in a devastating take on Bill’s mother, Maria Vacratsis supplies a gallery of razor-sharp portraits and the wondrous Torri Higginson dazzles as a family friend and legal counsel who definitely suffers from divided loyalties.
What we don’t get in Act I is much from Gross’s Bill. It’s the script’s fault, not the actor’s. But that dynamic changes in Act II and not for the better.
Burns’s good wife Judy vanishes for a long stretch of time and Gross takes over as his character starts sliding toward a bottom as frightening as it is inevitable. To Gross’s credit, he pulls not a punch and doesn’t try to enlist his considerable charm to make this despicable man more palatable.
But in the end, what does it mean? We’re never really sure if we’re supposed to hate Bill, admire him grudgingly, or wish someone would put him in a padded cell.
Domesticated gives us a lot of Grade A-professionals working at the top of their game and it’s worth the price of admission to see Gross and Burns lighting up the sky with their talent. But the play they’ve chosen? Well, that’s another matter.