Trying to find common ground
‘Small Things’ stirs up laughs
When we meet Patricia and Birdy in the first of the 20 short scenes adding up to Daniel MacIvor’s “Small Things” — receiving its American premiere in a just-opened Boulevard Theatre production being directed by Mark Bucher — it’s hard to imagine them finding common ground.
Patricia (Christine Horgen) is a cultured, prim and self-conscious blueblood who initially insists upon being called Mrs. Branch. Birdy (Donna Lobacz) is an unselfconscious blabbermouth without a filter applying for a job as Patricia’s housekeeper. Or “maid,” in Patricia-speak; she even wants Birdy to wear a uniform.
As removed from these two as they are from each other is Dell (Nicole Gorski), Birdy’s drifting daughter and mother of two boys, all three of whom live with Birdy.
Much of what ensues from the frequently funny MacIvor — yet another renowned Canadian playwright who is rarely produced here — is straight-up situational comedy.
Birdy is the straw stirring this drink, in ways that frequently reduce her to a caricature as an impossibly naïve and frequently narrow-minded rube. She has an opinion about everything and most of them are ill-informed; we laugh at her rather than with her.
Birdy’s employer and daughter prove more intriguing. While not fully explored by MacIvor or within this production, one gets the sense that both are darker and go deeper.
While Patricia was so awash in money she needn’t have ever worked, she’s also a recently retired teacher, with a curiosity and capacity for empathy at odds with her persona. Birdy isn’t wrong in labeling her as someone “not comfortable feeling comfortable.” But Horgen suggests someone who’d like to loosen up, if she only knew how.
It’s Dell who does most to help Patricia get there. Their growing affinity is least interesting when helped along by marijuana flakes, played for laughs and really just a substitute for Patricia’s tendency to get drunk, underscoring how lonely and lost she actually is.
The real bond between these two involves their shared belief that Dell’s youngest (and never seen) boy has every right to call himself Alice and use the girl’s bathroom at school; true to type, Birdy vociferously opposes any indulgence of what she sees as her grandson’s “phase.”
Would that MacIvor had actually plumbed this significant and timely issue rather than using it as yet another plot device, deployed through arid debate to underscore the overarching theme of this play: Whether we’re talking about Schubert (as this play does) or people, “Nothing is really just one thing.”
So stipulated, with regard to gender and so much else. But as with its sentimental and unearned insistence on this point at play’s end, “Small Things” is more apt to tell than show this great truth, through characters regarding whom there’s too much about which