MIDDLETOWN: SURPRISING PLEASURES

Artistic adventure is rare in Vancouver theatre these days. Want some? I’ve got a show for you. On so many levels, Sticks and Stones Theatre’s production of Middletown is such a surprising pleasure.

Like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which clearly inspired it, playwright Will Eno’s script is about the ordinary — and staggering — stuff we mostly take for granted: the mind-boggling strangeness of mortality (the thrilling mammalian spectacle of birth, the incomprehensibility — and inevitability — of death), and the wonder — and loneliness — of everything that comes in between.

Near the beginning of the play, a married woman named Mary arrives in Middletown. The local cop describes the place: “Middletown. Population: stable. Elevation: same. The main street is called Main Street. The side streets are named after trees”: Middletown is Everytown.

Mary, who’s looking for books about prenatal health because she wants to get pregnant, although her husband is almost always out of town, soon meets John at the local library. John is one of those guys who’s so sensitive he’s like a vibrating filament. In him, it’s an attractive quality, but things aren’t going well. Within minutes of meeting Mary, he confides that he’s between two lousy jobs, “I just don’t know what the next one is yet.”

Much of Middletown runs on the charge of its surreal comic surprises. The cop is the rough equivalent to Our Town’s Stage Manager, who’s a gentle existentialist: Henry Fonda plays him in the movie. But, almost as soon as we meet him, Middletown’s cop strangles the town drunk to the brink of death. Billy club around the guy’s neck, he hollers, “Say, ‘This is my hometown.’ Say, ‘My life is a mystery to me.’ Say it! Be filled with humility. With wonder and awe. Awe!” When the drunk finally gasps all that out, the cop releases him and apologizes: “I was just trying to imitate Nature.” For me, the first part is a joke about sentimentality, the second a hilariously brutal observation about Nature and our place in it.

Throughout, Eno brings the absurdities of physical existence to the surface. In the library, John is offered a book called Gravity, the Silent Killer. The drunk says, “I am nothing special, post-natally speaking.” And John says, “I had the worst night. Almost non-stop meaningful silence.”

This is balanced with wonder. Awe. The guide who’s giving a tour has never left Middletown, but she knows how to dig deep beneath its surface. A resident who’s an astronaut gazes down on Earth and fondly imagines his neighbours there.

Although we loosely follow Mary and John, Act 1 is largely episodic and full of characters we meet only briefly. About 15 minutes before the intermission, I started to long for more narrative traction and emotional depth — both of which Act 2 delivers. The second act is set in and around the local hospital’s emergency room, so the stakes are high.

Co-directed by Arthi Chandra and Jamie King, this production offers gorgeous design elements. In the astronaut’s monologue, stars sparkle on the theatre’s walls. (The lighting design is by Alexandra Caprara). A mesh cylinder drops to surround the astronaut, and, when the stars hit that cylinder, the evocation of outer space becomes persuasively three-dimensional. Animations by Keely O’Brien (illustrator) and Daniel O’Shea (projection designer) make good use of the theatre’s long side walls. The elegantly simple production design is by Alaia Hamer.

But it’s the acting that really brings Eno’s script home. With a core company of 11 players, it’s a large ensemble, and the overall performance level is excellent — although there are variations within that.

Anita Wittenberg’s multi-textured portrait of the librarian is stellar. The character is busy, even fussy, and Wittenberg masters all that comedy. But the librarian is also the play’s fullest embodiment of the script’s exhortation to “Be a good human”: she viscerally registers her neighbours’ joys and tragedies. In Act 2, in a scene with the cop outside the emergency room, Wittenberg went so deep so authentically she broke my heart.

Jay Clift is also some kind of wonderful as vulnerable John — again, a mix of comic mastery and nuanced depth. John’s loneliness — his aloneness — in Act 2: brace yourself.

I also particularly appreciated Mike Wasko’s comic timing as the cop.

The stage is populated by many of Vancouver’s best actors (Peter Anderson, Zac Scott, Kaitlyn Yott), and a couple I’m unfamiliar with but am eager to see more of (Lisa Goebel and Kevin Nguyen).

Within this — and without dismissing anybody’s work — I want to mention a couple of performance elements that worked less well for me. Melissa Oei delivers a solid but straightforward performance as Mary: I suspect there’s room for more nuance, more internal conflict. (This concern did not substantially throw the evening off course for me.) And, playing a tourist, Steffanie Davis leans into a southern accent: as acting choices go, this is low-hanging fruit and it’s distracting — but that’s a relatively minor caveat.

I want to thank Zac Scott of Sticks and Stones Theatre, who championed this ambitious, satisfying production, who does a great job of playing the drunk, and who delivers one of the play’s most moving lines: “I want to know love. I’d like to calmly know love on Earth.” Amen, brother. I wish that for all of us.

MIDDLETOWN By Will Eno. Directed by Arthur Chandra and Jamie King. On Friday, September 20. A Sticks and Stones Theatre production presented by Pacific Theatre. Running at Pacific Theatre until October 6. Tickets and information

PHOTO CREDIT: Anita Wittenberg and Zac Scott (Photo by Chelsea Stuyt)