CITYSONG: PRAISE BE

I’m not going to tell you that either this script or this production is perfect, but I am going to say hallelujah! Let’s hear it for the long view. Let’s hear it for philosophical and artistic ambition. Let’s hear it for the tenderness, confidence, and commitment this company is bringing to the project. And let’s hear it for Vital Spark Theatre for snagging the North American premiere of Irish playwright Carys D. Coburn’s Citysong.

The script is a prose poem that follows three generations of a Dublin family (plus assorted other characters) over the course of a single day — and, as the playwright’s website says, “it turns out one day holds the entire past.”

This script is all about the simultaneity of human experience, the endless cycles, including — especially — the phases of spring-green freshness.

When we meet the young couple Kate and Rob, Kate’s about to give birth. At the same time, Kate’s mom Brigid is widowed and dementing, but that overlaps with Brigid when she’s 18 and falling in love, and in mid-life, when she’s battered by trauma and estranged from her husband. Kate’s son Michael sees his father on Grafton Street, then realizes it’s his reflection. Michael’s teenage son Fionn struggles to understand sex, and we see that fumbling repeat itself across generations.

In director Joan Bryans’ production, the text is shared by nine actors. Even those who take on stable characters also shapeshift into other personae. Great swaths of the text are delivered as narration that sounds like song.

Here’s how Citysong frames the big picture, the web of interrelatedness: “We multiply each other, not our bodies but our functions, unfold into roles like uncharted continents, travelling daughterward or husbandwise or widdertwins, becoming through the compass of kin and no matter whether we wouldn’t or would.

“And today’s baby opens his eyes and inherited blood like a map, a book, or the heavens.”

“And this here is the important part,” we’re told. “People may stop when it rains but their clocks don’t, with their hands like restless semaphore-sayers, that clasp and then part again in noon and midnight prayers, and their peaceless motion in ceaseless devotion bespeaks or betokens no granting of mercy to us.

“Time ticks onward, not cruelly, but unstoppably.

“Time — both like and unlike the rain — passes and is endless. So let us continue.”

Sweet Mary! The playwright’s debt to Dylan Thomas and James Joyce is as welcome as it is clear.

In performance, because of the company’s humility and care, none of this is daunting. Sitting in the theatre, you can feel the actors’ fondness for the material — and their investment in it — flowing from the stage.

In this entirely non-Equity company, not everybody’s equally adept with their Irish accents or equally subtle with their delivery, but that matters less than the shared, unbroken commitment. Jono Klassen (Rob), Daryl Hutchings (Brigid’s husband Frank), and Alex Bloor (Michael) are particularly skilled in their handling of the poetry and Kim Little’s Brigid provides the backbone of the evening. Claire DeBruyn is solid as Kate. But everybody has their moments. I’m thinking, for instance, of Mukta Chachra’s delivery of a young girl’s hilariously pithy sex lecture, for instance, and the trembling insecurity Liam Atticus Wong bring to 14-year-old Fionn as he negotiates his first night at a disco.

What did I think was missing?

About ten minutes before the end of Act 1, I’d had about enough of the script and wasn’t sure I needed an Act 2. I think that’s partly because, as much as I love the text at it’s best, it’s not as consistently evocative — at least not as consistently evocative here — as the best productions of Under Milkwood, for instance. High bar, I know. My sense of wanting more from the text might have been exacerbated by director Bryans’ decision to set a clipped conversational pace; there were times when more space to sink into the language might have helped. But that’s only a theory, and these concerns disappeared in the much shorter second act.

Citysong is surprisingly heteronormative. Yes, when dealing with cycles of procreation and death, babymaking is a big deal, but we all know there’s more than one way to skin that cat — just as we all know there’s more than one way to negotiate adolescent sexuality — and we queer folk are part of the web.

By freeing up her casting more, Bryans might have extended inclusivity. (Both the script and production already include immigrant experience.) Especially since Citysong is about commonality, even collectivity, I would have loved to see a young male actor performing Kate or Brigid, for instance, or an older woman as Fionn. (There is one moment of cross-gender casting in this production, but it’s brief.)

More importantly, sensuality is a huge part of the theatrical experience, and, working with her set, lighting, and sound designers, I wish Bryans had done a more thorough job of creating a sensual theatrical experience to complement and extend the sensuality of the writing.

Still, the text.

I appreciate how beautifully it speaks to embodiment in romantic attachment. As Kate and Rob sink into the comfort, the “homecoming” of their shared physicality — Kate realizes that this is what her newly widowed mom has lost. Kate is struck by Brigid’s “sudden poverty.”

Brigid asks, “Is this the end of tenderness, will I be kissed again? Will I be held again?”

She addresses the absent Frank: “What am I supposed to do with your shoe size or your shirt collar, the way you like your steak done or your hand held or not to be talked to at the pictures, what do I do with that? … You’ve made trivia of my memory of you and there’s no quiz I can win with it.”

I could listen to writing like that all night. I don’t care much about my reservations.

I recommend this production.

CITYSONG by Carys D. Coburn. Directed by Joan Bryans. A Vital Spark Theatre production. Running at the Jericho Arts Centre until May 17. Tickets and information.

PHOTO CREDIT: (Photo of Jono Klassen, Claire DeBruyn, and Kim Little by Nancy Caldwell)

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