SummerWorks Web Report - August 9, 2002

PERFORMANCE UPDATES

Do "and-they-lived-happily-ever-after" endings happen very often in real life? We're taught by all sorts of means – fairy tales, TV and films, advertising – that we need lasting, loving relationships, but the search for romance sometimes ends up sour rather than sweet.

A trio of couples experiences that descent to earth in SummerWorks productions, shows that are successful in varying degrees.

Alistair A. Vogan's The Crash Of Twenty-Nine follows a married couple, Scott and Emily, on their drive along the 401 to a friend's wedding. In the course of the drive – which includes shifts into fantasy land and down memory lane – the two realize that theirs isn't an ideal relationship; it no longer holds the promise it did at the start.

There's some cleverness in Vogan's shift into and out of the minds of the characters, and some funny lines, but too often the writing is a blend of TV script and stand-up that doesn't gel. The performances by Christina Jol and Greg McGrade aren't as sharp as they might be, but that's partly because director Colin Rivers hasn't found a way to integrate the internal and external dialogues without an awkward shifting of gears.

There's no problem with the performances or the direction in Forms Of Devotion, adapted from a book by Diane Schoemperlen. Everyone involved – director Mark Cassidy, performers Liza Balkan and Hume Baugh, designers Tania Etienne, Darren Copeland and Gareth Crew, composer Anne Bourne and videographer Laura Okuda-Hara – contributes to the theatricality of the piece, but the text never makes the transition to the stage.

The couple at the work's centre, called simply She and He, move from the exhilaration of a new relationship to the prickly discontent of separation. The text's poetic prose is a blend of philosophical moments - the meaning of faith in various contexts is central here - lists of personal qualities and parallel scenes that play out differently, but it's the actors rather than the words that give the show its emotional core. Both Baugh and Balkan are clearly committed to the material, and their physical interactions create a passion and then a coolness that's palpable.

The most successful of this trio of works is Sean Reycraft's One Good Marriage That One, That One, a skilful blend of comedy and horror that's as much about the unspoken relationship between the anniversary-celebrating couple Steph (Mary Francis Moore) and Stewart (Jeff Miller) as it is about the narrative itself.

Over the course of the show we learn about a horrific tragedy that befell the couple – I can't say more about it without giving away important plot information – and how they're dealing with it. Reycraft moves from comic line to chilling revelation in a sentence, and there are times the transition is so swift, we're caught mid-laugh by a sense of horror. Shari Hollett's direction sharpens the script, and the two performers offer us a memorable duo whose initially tentative love has gone down a road they'd never have anticipated.

But while you follow the fascinating story, watch how author, actors and director deftly handle the nature of the relationship between Stewart and Steph. Notice the way he calms her down when she gets upset, how she regularly has to amend his "I" statements to "we" statements, how he corrects her verb tenses, how they bond (or don't) through a look or a gesture. And if you get an extra little frisson in the last minute of the end of the play, don't worry – so has every other audience member.