COME BACK LITTLE SHEBA
Ric Reid as Doc and Corrine Koslo as Lola are two superbly realized and devastating performances in Inge’s Come Back Little Sheba, directed by Jackie Maxwell. Lola is edgy, nosy, nervously chatty, hungry to know or inhabit other lives by peeping, prying, and not letting them leave her presence. She is weighted down by her plumpish body, but more so by her past which deprived her of having children and took her beloved dog Sheba. She’s a woman of starved sensuality and ignored sexuality, one given to writhing exotically and staring at the bodies of young men who happen to come to her home.
“Are you sorry you had to marry me?” she asks Doc, and acknowledges she has got “old, fat, and sloppy.” And Lola continues to retrieve the past, linger in it, trying to bring it back to life like her dead dog. She loves an alcoholic and she holds within her a number of intense sorrows and fears. When she phones her mother, after the violently drunk Doc has been dragged to hospital, she confesses, “I’m very unhappy” and her speaking of these lines is truly heartbreaking to witness. She has chattered away endlessly to keep things together and now they have fallen apart.
Doc is efficient, perhaps overly considerate, sensitive, calmly outgoing but worn, a man who has almost given up but goes on, a man who like his wife is wound tight. Schubert’s Ave Maria visibly touches his heart but his wife switches the radio to “peppy music” and as always he complies. He is repeatedly referred to as a “real gentleman” and “nice” and we know he will crack soon.
Doc resents Turk who easily beds the young boarder Maria who torments him, perhaps because he wants to do the same or because he needs her as a female ideal or because, since reality has done him in, he needs an illusion that no one else can touch. When Turk does more than just touching the willing Maria, Doc goes back to the bottle. Doc knows he has wasted his life and wants something in his life that doesn’t disappoint, so he urgently advises, “you gotta keep on going.”
The acting of Ric Reid and Corrine Koslo never suggests calculation for effect and thus it hits deep. It is acting that finds the humane poetry of ordinariness in these people of unspectacular lives and deep loss who struggle hard to hold themselves together. In these stunning performances, Doc and Lola are played inwardly as much as though their connection with others, so their unspoken and wounded lives are potently present as much as their words.
When Lola breaks from Doc’s hurtful verbal assault, we break with her, and when she quietly waits for the drunk Doc’s return, the tension, for her and for us, is unbearable. When Doc and Lola awkwardly and desperately cling to each other, this production achieves the subtly realized level of compassion it has suggested all along. Reid’s and Koslo’s acting, under Maxwell’s astute guidance, achieves an ultimate aspiration of theatrical folk in that it doesn’t seem like acting. Perhaps that’s why watching this very honest production hurts so much.
Jackie Maxwell’s production is carefully understated and nuance-attuned. Christina Poddubiuk’s setting features a cramped living room in which every space is used and also a small kitchen whose surfaces are off white or modulated yellow, the kinds of aged surfaces that will never be really clean again of the unhappy lives that have used them. In this crowded setting, lives don’t merely collide, but they also overlap and penetrate one another. Each life inhabits the others and changes them. Zachary Florence’s syncopated trumpet-led small group jazz score doesn’t suggest a mid-western city but provides an atmospheric envelope of sound that reflects and comments as an outsider might on these disappointed lives.
As well, we have Maria and Turk as the younger generation and they seem inexperienced in life, oblivious to it, which they are. As Maria Julia Course is fresh and almost ripe, innocently suggestive and patronizing with her body, while Kevin McGarry as Turk is sexual and looking for sex, and certainly not “the marrying kind”. Both seem optimistic and unaware of a world beyond themselves, but we wonder if in time they might become their individual versions of Lola and Doc, when life gradually happens to them. They are secure in untested innocence now. Will they be strong when life makes them fragile?
HIS GIRL FRIDAY
The original version of The Front Page was first produced in 1928, so His Girl Friday, a combo of the former and the Howard Hawks film His Girl Friday of 1940, is a hybrid concocted and set in 1939 by John Guare for Britain’s National Theatre in 2003. Ergo references to FDR, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, The Wizard of Oz, communist pamphlets, Hitler, the pro Nazi vote in Chicago, isolationist factions in the US, the slimy side of Joseph Kennedy. Also, lines like, “They’re hanging the guy so nobody will notice how many are unemployed” or “We write what our bosses tell us to write” give insight into the times.
In director Jim Mezon’s fresh and involving production, actors move at a frantic pace like balls in heated games of squash, as dialogue zaps around the press room. We have cigarettes, fedoras, suspenders, gobbled sandwiches, guy talk, collective horniness for Kiera Sangster’s ‘Her’ and close quarters newspaper men, slightly grumpy and deprived of sleep, who are loud, gruff, opportunistic, cynical and bullying. A hanging is imminent and all these restless writers want is a story. The dialogue zigzags, the blocking is crisp and the characters are clearly inscribed with eccentricities that make each one stand out from the ensemble. The cluttered setting is believably the den of headline hungry scribes.
As Walter Burns, Benedict Campbell is bullish, hyper confident, animated as a story teller, a man consumed by the urge to report. He is “a cheap reporter who would sell his soul for a story” and “a double crossing swine,” but he gets to declare the socially conscious following: “Do you realize what might be happening? We’ve lived in the Depression so long, our hearts have turned to stone. And our elected officials like it that way! They talk jobs. They talk hope. But what they’re really running on is Fear. Fear of the Future. Fear of the little guy. Don’t let the Government help the downtrodden! Erase them. They’re weak. Fear of weakness! Worship Big Business!
As Hildy, Nicole Underhay is a pleasing 40s broad with a confident small step strut, one who is quick, savvy, reachable, and aggressively physical when she sits on Peter Millard’s Woodenshoes. Hers is a self-sufficient will to write at a breathtaking pace, and she can deceive without losing a beat. Underhay plays her with an endless supply of quickly changing devices, be they facial, bodily or vocal. She declares “I’m a newspaper man” and there is no doubt about it.
Hildy’s fiancé, Kevin Bundy’s Bruce, is exciting as porridge, instantly boring, not in the least worldly, with a brain that never exceeds low gear. He heeds his pro capitalist mom to the letter and, if that doesn’t turn you off, he also declares to his fiancée “if you love me, you will obey me”. But, no, he’s not a Republican candidate.
In minor roles, Thom Marriot makes an imposing and unprincipled bigwig Mayor, while Lorne Kennedy as Pincus compactly blends principles and drunkenness in a scene stealing vignette. Likewise does the entertainingly hateful Mrs. Baldwin of Wendy Thatcher who, in an unflattering exit, declares “I blame the decline of the west on Jane Austen”. Peter Krantz, as the opportunistic Sherriff, is appropriately sucky but, no, he’s not a Republican candidate either.
Whether you accept the play’s updating by a decade or not, this is splendid high gear entertainment which, alas, rings repeated relevance in today’s ultra-conservative political milieu.