At several points watching People, Places & Things, I was very moved.
There’s a lot to admire in The Search Party’s production.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that there’s a great deal of nonsense wrapped around the pure, humble thread that is the play’s heart.
Duncan Macmillan’s script starts with an actress having a mental breakdown in the middle of playing Nina in a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull. When she checks herself into rehab, stoned out of her mind on drugs and alcohol, she gives her name, falsely, as Nina. Not a great start.
For the entire long (90-minute) first act, Nina throws up a smokescreen of intellectualism, avoiding the truth of her pain by questioning the existence of truth. She refuses to expose herself in the group therapy that’s the bedrock of the centre’s treatment by questioning one of its 12-step underpinnings, the existence of a higher power. Sure, there’s validity in Nina’s challenges, but she’s doing the Foucault shuffle: nobody can touch her because she’s the smartest person in the room.
So what is going on with Nina, as I’ll refer to her? There are references to a sibling that broke my heart every time they came up — even though Nina is a compulsive liar, so I could never be entirely certain her stories were true. And, in terms of understanding Nina, the play’s last big scene is a gut punch.
Still, there’s the nonsense.
I don’t buy playwright Macmillan’s take on group therapy, for instance. I’ve done a bunch of group therapy as a participant and, in my experience, it is, unsurprisingly, about the group, the interactions among group members, the sense of intimacy, safety, and connection that can allow for true vulnerability and honesty, leading, potentially, to transformation, which is the point.
But People, Places & Things is the all-Nina-all-the-time show: other group members barely exist. The script presents Nina as solipsistic, but it seems to share her perspective that everything really is all about her. There are a lot of other characters: most members of this production’s nine-actor cast play multiple roles, but none of the secondary characters are fully developed. Even a group member named Mark, who nudges Nina along a bit, is only sketched in.
In a repetitive device, other participants set up scenes they want to explore in role play during group therapy, but the set-ups are all we get: no scenes, no real insight into those characters or how Nina might relate to them. The device is a frustrating waste of time.
I will get to the good stuff, I promise.
But, before I do, I want to make one more point. Rather than meaningfully, practically exploring the origins of Nina’s addictions — childhood abandonment, which is often a factor in the formation of addictive personalities, might have been a good choice — playwright Macmillan does his own version of the Foucault shuffle: he spends too much time, in my opinion, riffing on more abstract concerns about the nature of reality. He posits the idea that Nina’s work as an actor has exacerbated her decline: she has trouble with reality because she’d rather pretend, because that’s her job.
In my experience, actors are more not less likely to be open to emotional vulnerability — and truth — than members of the general population and I suspect that concentrating on the nature of reality might simply be a smokescreen for Macmillan’s inability to say anything practical about addiction. Nina is in a 12-step program, but the steps virtually never come up.
Okay. Good stuff. Great stuff.
When Nina peels — and she really peels — actor Tess Degenstein goes all the way with her. Being cast in this show has given Degenstein a rare opportunity to show a more serious side of her considerable talent. For the most part, she gives a bravura performance. Sometimes, I would have liked her to pull back a little bit, to simply be, but that’s partly a directorial issue. And, despite this quibble, I’m very grateful for the way Degenstein reached inside and opened me up.
I was also particularly fond of Stephen Lobo’s sweetly understated work as a rehab employee named Foster. It never felt to me like Lobo was acting, and that’s a compliment.
In the final scene, playing characters we haven’t previously met, actors Kevin McNulty and Jennifer Clement deliver devastating work. Clement’s characterization sucked the air out of the room — and out of my lungs.
The always reliable Amir Ofek has delivered yet another sleekly sculptural set, a huge, glossy, institutional floor that lights up in grid-like patterns, reinforcing the often-expressionistic nature of Macmillan’s text.
And, as they’re realized here, the textures of that text played a huge role in keeping me sensually engaged in this production: even though I was often ill at ease with the framing of the story, I never, for a second, stopped watching it. Sophie Tang’s lighting is dynamic and, based on the template of Macmillan’s script, so is Mindy Parfitt’s direction. When Nina is coming off benzos, for instance, multiple, blond-wigged versions of her seem to appear out of thin air, writhing to Kate De Lorme’s sound design, shaped by Heather Laura Gray’s choreography.
Macmillan’s script is undeniably theatrical, and Parfitt has assembled a strong team to explore it. My frustration is not so much that People, Places & Things doesn’t have sufficient thoughts in its pretty head, it’s more that it gets lost in its abstractions and loses sight of practical wisdom.
PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS by Duncan Macmillan. Directed by Mindy Parfitt. Produced by The Search Party and presented by The Cultch. Running in The Cultch’s Historic Theatre as part of the Warrior Festival until March 22. Tickets and information.
PHOTO CREDIT: Tess Degenstein rippin’ it up in People, Places & Things (Lighting by Sophie Tang. Costume by Alaia Hamer. Photo by Emily Cooper)
THERE’S MORE! You can get all my current reviews PLUS curated local, national, and international arts coverage in your inbox FREE every week if you subscribe to Fresh Sheet, the Newsletter. Just click that link. (Unsubscribe at any time. Super easy. No hard feelings.) Check it out.
0 Comments