Theatre Ontario Festival: Human Comedy

I'm sure some of my most faithful followers were wondering why I hadn't reviewed the first two shows in this year's Theatre Ontario Festival.  The simple answer is that I didn't get to them.  But I am in Ottawa now, so here's my review of the third show.

Outside Mullingar
by John Patrick Shanley
Presented by Toronto Irish Players
Representing the ACT-CO Region

The best comedies, in the classic sense, are those plays which invite us to laugh at the characters on stage while at the same time ruefully recognizing ourselves, or aspects of ourselves, in them.  That's an excellent description of Outside Mullingar.

The script depicts four contrasted characters: the stubborn and determined Rosemary Muldoon, and her mother, world-weary and compassionate Aoife, and (in the house next door) cranky old Tony Reilly and his introverted son Anthony.  The ingredients from which the plot is compounded lead to some surprisingly amusing situations.  One point of reference that kept popping into my head was Bernard Shaw's famous dictum:  "Woman is the pursuer and the disposer; man, the pursued and the disposed of." 

The set used a bare frame outline of a house and a barn, the house (a kitchen) finished with a back counter, an old electric stove, and a wood burning stove off to one side.  A simple table with two chairs, and a larger armchair, completed the picture.  The curious thing for me was a nagging feeling that I had seen the set before, probably due to the fact that there are only so many things you can do when creating a fashionable framework-styled set for a house!

The back wall of the stage was a cyclorama which highlighted the actors beautifully.  My one major bone to pick with the visual aspect of the show was the incredible number of lighting changes playing across that backdrop.  At first intriguing, the frequent shifts of all the colours of the lighting grew intrusive and then downright annoying as the often-blatant shifts kept yanking focus away from the actors.  Sometimes, in a very human play like this, simply lighting the action is a better choice than playing around with a fancy, complex lighting plot.

Among the four characters on stage, Barbara Taylor as Aoife Muldoon did fine work in moving through a whole series of vivid and contrasting emotional states while holding steadily to the physicality of the older woman dying of an unnamed illness.  

As her daughter, Rosemary, Elaine O'Neal portrayed a woman full of vigour and energy, with a strong impatient streak running through her.  Although a brief programme note referred to her as introverted and eccentric, what I got was extroverted and eccentric.  The interpretation still worked well with the script, except for one scene -- the one where she talks about wanting to commit suicide.  Due to her apparently healthy and energetic temperament, this came out at first as sounding like teasing or manipulation directed at Anthony.  It took me several minutes to realize that she actually meant it.

Dermot Walsh as cranky old Tony Reilly certainly got the cranky part clear, and the stubbornness that went with it.  What was less clear was the actual words of his speeches.  Whether because of the speed at which he spoke, or a lack of truly clear diction (or both), it was often difficult to pick up more than two or three out of every ten words he said.  There was one scene in Act 1 where Rosemary was arguing with him, and because she was moving around behind him, her words also vanished for a minute or so into the great beyond. 

Chris Irving gave a strongly emotional performance as Tony's son, Anthony.  His unwillingness to stand up to his father determined his every moment in Act 1.  Most moving of all was the moment when he finally cracked and let his feelings, telling Tony that he didn't really love the farm as much as he said her did.  In Act 2, his comic timing paid off time and again during the entire scene which was, in effect, a prolonged mating dance with Rosemary.  In fact, the four members of the cast all created splendid examples of perfectly timed payoff lines.

Director Harvey Levkoe created a whole series of fine stage pictures, with the most magnificent of all being the last scene of Act 1, a touchingly lovely portrait of two children bidding their respective parents farewell in quite different ways.  Another was the opening sequence of Act 2, in which Anthony crossed back and forth from side to side of the stage lugging a milk can, a crate, and other farming odds and ends, changing his coat or sweater at the end of each cross, while Rosemary, from her kitchen, watched him working through an imaginary front window.  Perfect way to underline the lapse of four years between the two acts.

While I got some good hearty laughs out of this delightful script and the fine performance by this company, the laughter for me kept getting leavened with those rueful little smiles that we get on our faces when we realize that the play is actually holding up a mirror to us, and we are willingly gazing into it.