The easy, costly comfort of fear in the upper class
Orphans ★★★ (out of 4) Written by Dennis Kelly. Directed by Leora Morris. Until April 30 at Coal Mine Theatre, 1454 Danforth Ave. CoalMineTheatre.com
In the age of Netflix, food-delivery apps and Skype, it’s universally acknowledged how easy it is to stay inside, in the comfort of our homes.
In Dennis Kelly’s living-room thriller Orphans, it’s not only comfort and convenience that keeps its three characters bound to their home; it’s the dangerous urban streets outside that keep them sheltered in fear.
You could describe Orphans as a situational tragedy, beginning with a potentially comedic opening: a romantic dinner between husband and wife Danny (David Patrick Flemming) and Helen (Diana Bentley) is rudely interrupted by Helen’s younger brother Liam (Tim DowlerColtman).
Except in a sitcom, Liam would barge in without a thought; in Orphans, he waits 15 minutes before gingerly making his entrance, his ripped clothes covered in blood. He claims the blood is another young man’s, whom he found stabbed on the road and tried to help before the man got up and ran away, leaving Liam with ruined clothes, in shock and looking for refuge at his sister’s house (orphaned since childhood, Helen and Liam have an intimate, co-dependent bond).
From then on, as holes appear in Liam’s story and moments of dry English humour reveal themselves, Leora Morris’s production revels in the tension that comes from black and white, us vs. them, in-or-out boundaries in neighbourhoods, societies and families.
Thanks to deliberate accent work with dialect coach Rae Ellen Bodie, Helen and Liam are audibly from a different world than Danny, who is consistently composed even when the evening descends into a horrific repudiation of liberal ideals in urban London, which tends to lean toward drama at the expense of plausibility.
Though it’s yet more evidence of the “us against the world” mentality that Liam and Helen share, and that Danny staunchly opposes (at first), the distinction in accents does present a potentially troubling dynamic: The play tracks how the traumafilled lives of the lower class bring the more morally bound upper class down to their level, as Danny’s standards lower until he doesn’t recognize himself or his world.
The trajectory is adroitly handled by Flemming, culminating in a final scene that has Danny struggling to maintain self-control after experiencing the violence that lies outside the walls of his home, trying to keep his house a sanctuary for his 5-yearold son.
Orphans premiered in post-economic-collapse, post-bombings London in 2009. Kelly’s most wellknown play then was Love and Money, about how materialism drives a happy marriage into suicide and violence, but he was also known for the BBC sitcom Pulling (since then, his biggest hit has been the book for Matilda the Musical).
Born out of a rash of headlines about racially motivated acts of violence, Orphans arrives at another moment when anti-Muslim and anti-black crimes are embedded deep in mainstream consciousness.
Orphans has contemporary relevance, even if it doesn’t necessarily make the same bold statement it may have in London in 2009. (It’s, sadly, not shocking to learn that upper-class liberals are capable of violence when frightened or threatened by a faceless enemy.)
But that doesn’t mean Morris’s production — featuring an engrossing performance from Bentley as Helen, vibrating on the brink of tearing her new family apart to save her original one — isn’t chock-full of suspense. As the lights came up, I realized I had been holding tightly to the neckline of my shirt. Had I been wearing pearls, I would have been clutching those, too.