Exploring mental health of North America’s poor
The Damage Done (out of 4) Written by George F. Walker. Directed by Ken Gass. Until Dec. 11 at the Citadel, 304 Parliament St. CanadianRep.ca or 416-364-8011.
“Just don’t write about the f---ed up, angry and desperate and you might have a chance,” writes George F. Walker in his latest play The Damage Done, which opened at The Citadel in a production with Canadian Rep Theatre Tuesday night. It is said by Tina to her ex-boyfriend Bobby, who has found a sudden interest in playwriting after years of odd jobs and failed grand schemes. The joke is, of course, that George F. Walker is famous for writing exactly those types of characters, including Tina and Bobby themselves.
The Damage Done is the third play in Tina and Bobby’s trilogy, following 1992’s Tough! and 2013’s Moss Park. Both of those plays take place when the couple is young, in their teens and early 20s, facing growing families, growing poverty and growing uncertainty about their romantic future, representing the Toronto working class of Walker’s own experience. The Damage Done follows up 18 years since we last saw Tina and Bobby, and the couple has since married and divorced with Tina taking on the parenting of their two teenage girls, Holly and Allie. But much like Tina’s piece of advice to Bobby insinuates that the viewer is aware of Walker’s body of work, he has written the latest episode in Tina and Bobby’s story assuming the audience has seen the previous two.
The reunion between Tina (Sarah Murphy-Dyson) and Bobby (Wes Berger) in The Damage Done occurs because Tina needs Bobby to take a more active role in the lives of their daughters. Again, they’re in the eastend park that gives the middle play its name. But a more symbolic representation of the neighbourhood that created Tina and Bobby makes sense at this point in their story, as the immediacy of the problems of their youth have festered into deeper, bigger, more indescribable problems.
The “damage” referred to in the play’s title refers to the trauma in the characters stemming from their upbringing and their split. Bobby, still banking on scams and girlfriends to make ends meet, doesn’t seem to have much of it. Berger’s portrayal of him keeps Bobby too dim or shallow to grasp the results of his actions on other people, even through to the end where it’s more than obvious. In fact, the aspect that makes their story worth revisiting is Walker’s exploration of the mental stress and exhaustion Tina feels after a lifetime of worry and the pressure of providing a safe life for two children. Though Walker treats the subject of suicide a little cavalierly — the conversation moves on quickly, as does Bobby’s character — and the script in The Damage Doneskims over the parts in Tina’s story that might help convey the extent of her trauma (she often refers to “the stuff” in her past).
But unfortunately, Walker’s script spends most of its time dwelling on Tina and Bobby’s antagonistic dynamics and sorrow over the fact they can’t make it work, topics that have already been thoroughly examined in the past. And the play veers into needless repetition when they, once again, debate the possibility of a reconciliation — a possibility so inconceivable that, after the 75 minutes of The Damage Done, comes off more annoying than tragic.
Walker’s choice to have Bobby finding solace in a playwright adds another meta layer to The Damage Done, as both characters find catharsis in seeing their story unfold on a page, while they also doubt the likelihood of “the theatre” to tell stories like that (which rings false, as written by one of the country’s most-produced playwrights).
While Walker gives himself a symbolic pat on the back for firstly writing these characters, and then giving them emotional emancipation by having one become a playwright who writes these characters, it does speak to the power of representation in art. And right now, the mental health of North America’s poor is one of the most appropriate topics to explore on stage.
The question of The Damage Done is whether an audience outside of Walker fans will be able to connect and care about Tina and Bobby as much as they should.
The ‘damage’ referred to in the play’s title refers to ’the stuff’ in the characters’ past