The Homecoming presents a familial battleground in which conversation is a slew of verbal attacks and counter attacks. The family members, all male, are bound in toleration of one another. They sit apart like persons made of human debris. Conversations consist of innuendo, non sequiturs and absurd turns, but it does fill space and time, both of which wrap around these suspended lives. No one expects a response; they ignore the words of others in order to control the speakers and then plan tactics as they respond. The air is tense with the feeling of lies being spun.

With Pinter, the playwright, people speak and mean something else, and use words, whatever their meaning, as weapons. Much is suggested and over time we wonder, for instance, who the whores in the life of this family are and who the fathers are. We wonder who is what they seem. It is a play written, and here immaculately directed by Jennifer Tarver, for undercurrents of menace and overt aggression. It is a play about survival. I once had a college student repeatedly call the play stupid until, when asked why, he blurted out, almost in tears, “It is just like my own family.” On the other hand, I have viewed Peter Hall’s production several dozen times and to me the play is like existential music.

Brian Dennehy plays Max with commanding presence, at least when seated, less so when standing and leaning on his cane. In either position, nonetheless, Max the father has a need for nastiness. His words reveal him, past and present, as a boorish bully, while his rare expression of humanity is merely the manifestation of a sentimental but manipulative heart. With the arrival of Ruth, he seems lighter and younger and more fluid of speech. Stephen Ouimette plays his brother Sam, with many subtle touches, as a man of gentle and delicate manners and inherent dignity. Sam, however, seems battered by his brutish family and their rituals of hostility.

The three sons include Aaron Krohn’s Lenny, whom Krohn aces as a squeezed personality of slime in a snit. He is quick to react, tightly wound up and volatile, and acts as if he is enduring the others. He likes to intrude whenever he can in a menacing way.  Joey, ably played by Ian Lake, is slow, absent minded, vain in his illusions of himself as a boxer, and an unquestionably brain-pummeled lad. The returning son, Teddy is played by Mike Shara with a nerdy, toothy grin and a distant manner. He is pixie-ish in dark rimmed glasses and, as an academic, mentally elsewhere. His pontifications have a clueless tone. 

With Cara Ricketts as Teddy’s wife Ruth we have the pivotal catalyst in the play’s narrative. Like the others, she too seems to have created an inner space immune to intrusion. Her manner is initially rigid and who knows what she thinks of her male company? She picks up on each game with ease after cool consideration, lets the potential opposition reveal itself, and cooly decides her course. Her manipulative spreading of her legs is aggressively luring, for she will now take control and the family will now serve her. In the end she wins and Max sobs “I am not an old man,” for now it is Ruth who decides what lie is a fact, the latest truth.

The Homecoming is a modern masterpiece and the actors here offer top notch creations in the Pinter idiom. You might be surprised after reading this account that the play is uniquely hilarious, but so it is –we are seduced into laughing at the mundane brutalities that people can be.  Without exception the actors blend and negotiate menace and humour with meticulous ease and, as a result, we feel that our world has been turned inside out.

At the outset of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the music track – Monk, Bird et al- seems to sweat within Sue Lepage’s  evocative, domineering, asymmetrical, and life-worn set.  And so does Moya O’Connell’s Maggie who, kept at a distance by husband Brick, also sweats emotionally with pain, frustration, indignation, and aggressive hopelessness.  Maggie is alone in her marriage and has become “frantic, hard and cruel”. She exudes both sexual and existential need and Brick is decisively cool. Theirs is a war of the unspoken on one level and if Maggie feels “punished” by the man she desires, he suggests that she “take a lover”. O’Connell neatly gives the role an intense but unforced undercurrent of frustration.

Maggie must endure her sister-in-law Mae’s petty competitiveness, for the latter has children and Maggie does not. Both Nicole Underhay as Mae and Jay Turvey as her husband are accusing, snooping, predatory, greedy, and sycophantic, and both actors give their presence a clammy potency. Mother-in-law Big Mama is loud, shrill and repugnant in Corinne Koslo’s compact characterization that is volatile with its own confused pain.  Big Mama doesn’t accept privacy and we ourselves, very soon, feel trapped and attacked in this household, thanks to cast and director.

There is naked flesh on display and we are also made to feel open to both the physical and emotional presence of Maggie and Brick in their dual of solitudes. The “one good thing” in Brick’s life was his friendship with pal Skipper and this fact fuels Maggie who is predatory with her pain, especially when Brick asks “how are you going to have a child by a man who can’t stand you?”

The great unresolved issue on all sides is Brick’s relationship with Skipper. Brick broods with inner torment, drinks himself into more of an inner hell which, in Act Two, Big Daddy attempts to reach and, in his own way, understand. Jim Mezon plays Big Daddy with massive and brutal animality, one that dominates everyone. He erupts with savage self-assertion, calls his years of marriage to Big Mama a hypocrisy, and each outburst by Mezon is truly disturbing.

Big Daddy is crude and vulgar—we even hear him piss – and he goes at Brick with unrelenting attacks. Brick has “a real liquor problem” and is “throwing his life away” but Brick only remarks “I try to look like I listen, but I don’t”. Big Daddy is big-bellied, easily enraged, and struggles for breath with a son who is distant and seems haunted and afraid. But Big Daddy too is another life – and this is Williams’ forte—that cannot escape it’s self.

At over three hours, this production remains charged with electricity throughout. Director Eda Holmes is incisive and insightful as she explores Williams’ knack for mundane exchanges that imply profoundly felt pain.  Big Daddy, Big Momma, and Maggie especially show how inner motives shape contours in the words they speak. We feel in both Williams’ writing and the performances a spontaneous selectivity for appropriate words that reflect the hopeless reality of each speaker’s life. Both Williams and cast make colloquial seem fresh and both suggest that a volatile undercurrent of the unspoken twists these characters at every turn.

Gray Powell plays Brick in a distinctly subdued key -the way Jay Turvey plays Dr. Baugh, his brother- as effectively dynamic in his sulking withdrawal. Although some might prefer more overt signs of inner torment and frustration from Brick, we must remember that both sons are the offspring of Big Daddy who doesn’t give anyone else room to have a life or a voice.  In fact, his lower key tends to enhance and display the wounded madness of the others. In all, this is a very powerful production and both the playwright and his memorable writing are well served.

Lorne Kennedy as Norrison declares, “I look forward to shutting off my brain,” but we then notice that most brains don’t function as fast as his Norrison speaks in The President. He takes enunciation and cadences at illegal speeds, even tosses in knowing looks about sex after marriage at the audience, but before we even begin to laugh he’s already done three more pages of the play. Kennedy is one special reason why I’ve seen this fifty minute show several times, and there are many like yours truly, fans of screwball comedies of the thirties, who have made return visits.

 Next, add Julie Martell’s Lydia, a busty bimbo with pouting lips who swings her hips when she says “body and soul” and as a result we think “body”. Even her commas are suggestive. Meanwhile, Norrison wants her “soybean king” father as an investor. Lydia’s “dahling” is Jeff Meadows’ doltish Tony, a member of the Communist party who seems a leftover worker from an Eisenstein film. Tony is not the quickest lad on the block and only initially resists his makeover from proletariat to surface capitalist. He is told, “Stop meddling in your own affairs,” but eventually he embraces the capitalist lingo and attitude. Tony perhaps will learn that money doesn’t solve everything –for example, Norrison’s ballerina mistress, Begonia, dumps him which causes much heartache inside that tailor-made suit of his.

 You have to pay close attention to this rapid fire farce, because lines like “Tristan and Isolde, I’ve seen it thirty-two times…it’s so depressing” fly by like trees seen from a speeding train window. The cast are smoothly wired into the frantic pace, all with idiosyncrasies succinctly placed into the frenzy for us to enjoy on the run. The cast include many Shaw Festival stalwarts like Peter Millard as efficient and obedient and compliant Bartleby. Many of the rest do double or triple roles and each one make s a major comic point in their few seconds.

The Arts, in the person of travelling theatrical actors doing their society-shaking repertoire, have upset the status quo in the Irish seaside town of Inish. The acting is “too good” and now “queer things are happening” as a result of this exposure to sophisticated, demanding drama. Folks who were “nice and ordinary” two years before now seem suspicious and everyone now assumes a shady past in everyone else. There’s even been an “accumulation of incidents of a slightly criminal nature,” all because the circus wasn’t turning a profit and it was decided to try “serious stuff like Russian plays” instead.

 Although Annie, wife of John, opines to offspring that “You’re taking those plays too seriously,” her son Eddie, for one, has succumbed to angst and despair fuelled by the works of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, the latter who sounds “like a cold in the head” according to Annie’s spinster sister-in-law Lizzie. Seeing such heavy duty drama causes “reflection and ideas” and Eddie, who is now “beginning to realize what life means,” in turn rages at his parents. It seems that “one learns by suffering” and Eddie is no longer “jolly” after a dose of Ibsen. And he is not the only victim of culture, as it were.

 Jim Clancy has thrown himself off the pier and Lizzie, albeit her melodramatic approach to truth, reveals a long-concealed secret that she was jilted way back when by Peter, now the local political rep. Moloney has set fire to his business and a couple in town has made a suicide pact, one which has failed because they had only a penny between them and the meter ran out. Slattery, who lives with an unpleasant aunt who will leave him her money when she dies, suspiciously asks to purchase weed killer and then rat killer. Politician Peter, inspired toward integrity after seeing Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, votes against the government.       

 There’s so much here in Drama at Inish by Lennox Robinson that is pleasant, pleasurable, warmly human, and very entertaining. To name but a few delights, we have the musicality of Irish speech as in Maggie Blake’s Helena, the exquisitely self-dramatizing presence of Mary Haney as Lizzie, the melodramatic and arty posturing of Corrine Koslo’s Constance and cape-waving Thom Marriott’s de la Mare, the subtly interwoven marriage of Donna Belleville’s Annie and Ric Reid’s John, the airhead politician of Peter Krantz, and Julia Course as Christine who wants to be more worldly than she is.  

 Director Jackie Maxwell achieves an uncondescending, almost loving, tone throughout and gives us both humanity’s foibles and humanity’s charm in one detail-sensitive stroke. The whole cast delivers distinct characterizations, each one filled with subtle touches of individuality and we see before us vulnerable persons and the society they preserve as a shelter for their unspoken lives. We believe they are what they say and when, of the plays, Annie muses, “Maybe they’re too good for the likes of us or we’re too simple for them,” we sympathize for a moment.

 But then we remember how destructive all round a self-deceiving and willful innocence in people can turn out to be. Perhaps that’s why Lennox Robinson’s Drama at Inish is, after Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, the second-most produced play in Ireland. It doesn’t mock its characters but certainly exposes them, sometimes in their own willing words, for the self-protecting limitations they are. Drama at Inish also celebrates the acting profession and theatre itself, and we in the audience are inevitably made to consider our own response to both. Are we open to the hard lessons of art or do we run away to mindless and unchallenging entertainment as the folks of Inish and most other people ultimately do?

The shipwreck that deposits both upper and serving classes onto a remote island changes everything, of course. But at the outset of J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, we have pampered, wearisome, and condescending upper classes doing pointless lives. Yes, the Earl of Loam, played innocent and appealingly decent by David Schurmann, has a “servants” day when roles are reversed, but the seven uppers have no idea who the sixteen lowers who cater to them are or what the world in which they dwell is like, and their disdain for the servants prevails.

 And the thought of only one maid for three daughters is treated as a catastrophe. After all, “how should we know it is morning if there is no one to pull up the blinds?”  On the island, where the upper classes become even more ridiculous, old habits die hard and Kyle Blair’s precisely realized Ernest remains rude, selfish, spoiled to the max, and must be kept in line. He would even steal his elderly uncle’s boots. Meanwhile Mr. Treherne, played quietly effectively by Martin Happer as a man with a sense of inherent dignity, remains the voice of civility and reason.

 After two years, there are many signs of innovation on the island, all by Crichton, the former household butler, who naturally – or by rule of nature? – is the head honcho. The once pampered Mary, played vigorously jungle wild by Nicole Underhay is now a true creature of the “natural” world. She kills for food, gives an animated account of her hunt, even beats her chest in a send up of savage self-assertion. The other young ladies now compete for their leader Crichton’s attention and approval, while Crichton, who’s become the “superior breed,” is now served at table where he can be fussy about food prepared for him by his former superiors.

The language spoken is hilariously “natural” and Crichton’s proposal to Mary goes like this: “I have grown to love you. Are you afraid to mate with me?” When the rescue ship arrives Crichton knows he “has got to play the game again.” The fact that truth belongs to the upper class is soon hit home, especially when in his published account of life on the island, Ernest claims Crichton’s resourcefulness and achievements as his own. Seeing old island habits dying hard is quite funny with the sisters now seated in a most unladylike fashion.

 Among the performances David Schurmann ably plays the Earl as a man of naïve optimism about social equality, a man who has never inhabited the lower end of society. The ideal of Steven Sutcliffe’s Crichton is that everyone is kept in his place and Crichton here, albeit in his accepted subservience, is an intriguing man of authority, especially since Sutcliff can command the stage with inherently charming ease. Crichton is not an old stuffy we might expect, but more of a young stuffy with the saving grace of a mysterious fire burning through him. Marla McLean’s Tweeny is something of an Eliza Doolittle who works indoors. She is happily full of “vulgar ways and Mclean neatly suggests her inner development over time, from London to island.

 In Morris Panych’s production, we do have a sense of a delicate and humorous play in colorful musical wrapping to make it please more. It is certainly an entertaining show and we have a wolf and a crow as singing narrators, with dance numbers and songs from the 20s interspersed throughout. We tap our toes as we wonder what Barrie’s play, without the compelling but perhaps irrelevant goodies Panych has added, a song by Irving Berlin say, might be. Still, this is a cast that styles each character with theatrically rich touches and it’s hard not to go with the flow and the show.

After the initial brief London run in 1933, Shaw’s On the Rocks was rarely produced in either Britain or North America. In director Joesph Ziegler’s crisp production, it is a play that is entertaining, provocative -but not as much as it could be- and in some ways very relevant to Canada’s political climate. We are told, for example, that “every politician is made worse by a life spent in politics”. This observation gets an enthusiastic hand from the audience. The carefully considered retorts that characters speak throughout are a constant pleasure. My favorite line, I think, is “You have the charm of a majestic ruin.”

 One does sense some loss of potential impact here, though, when the theatrical electricity of complex characters and situations takes a turn toward the simplistic or silly. We get the point that the major political players in Britain are variously lacking -we do keep an eye on Ottawa, after all- and don’t need Steven Sutcliffe sent into exaggeration as Dexter to over-prove the point. Idiocy desperately contained appears more ridiculous, no? Again, see Ottawa.

Even with GBS having fun with several names to lighten GBS doing outrageous and controversial, there are very serious matters still bluntly on the table but sometimes too elusive in realization. Much as I am stirred by Marla McLean as Aloysia giving a very passionate Trafalgar Square oration, I sense that containing the passion might have drawn us even more to an already interesting inner life that she has. Having the icy fury of Cherissa Richards’ Dame Adhira more intimately directed at individuals would be even more scary than her declarative stance. The Court House is a small and intimate space, after all and whispers from an inner world that motivates politics can be deadly here.

Still, even as we feel a missed opportunity to more effectively reveal the play’s implications, On the Rocks remains a thought-provoking play in this production. It addresses the fear of “boiling socialism,” the nationalization of everything, and of course  Bolshevism, especially among those whose wealth is unearned. In due course we have a riot by the working classes, otherwise called “masses of unemployed” and “pacifist cattle” who make speeches on street corners. It is noted that “no one ever throws a rock when listening to a speech,” so ideology and power are here tempered with pragmatism that allows the working class their soap box.

When Dame Adhira is called a “silly nigger bitch,” she gets to respond with “to hell with the lot of you” and we have a potent theatrical scene, one that gives the anti-colonialists and feminists in the audience an opportunity to applaud loudly. When Bemrose, in a carefully measured performance from Norman Browning, calls her a heathen and Sir Arthur, played flexibly but also lacking somewhat in authority of person by Peter Krantz, astutely notes “that one will cost us India,” we sense both the entrenched colonialist mentality of the British, the vulnerability of principles in politics which is all pragmatic and opportunistic maneuvering, and vested interests all about.     

The cast leap into their parts with relish and sometimes with too much hot sauce. Peter Krantz as Sir Arthur seems a self-satisfied man of irritating (to his political foes) self-assured smugness. He speaks with a pinched urgency in his voice and suffers, we are told, from “a common English malady…. an underworked brain.” Steven Sutcliffe as Dexter boils with a self-indulgent frustration and whether you find him too hysterical or delightfully pushed over the top is your call. Tom Marriott’s pragmatic Commissioner of Police, Basham, displays an acute but benign sense of irony that freshens the play whenever he speaks.  Anthony Beckenn’s Mayor is meaty with bull doggedness, while Guy Bannerman is solid in his ways of the world savoir-faire. The Shaw Festival does ensemble so bloody well.

There is much appealingly intense female energy throughout this production and the “Get off the earth” speech from Marla McLean’s Aloysia is the most extraverted of the lot. It is played with touching fierce gusto and sounds like a humanistic canon or cannon. Mary Haney is, as usual, perfectly etched, but with little to do. She is delightfully adept at plasticity in body and voice and shapes many an innuendo nonetheless. Cherissa Richards brings a balancing tone of elegance to the goings-on as Adhira and the lower key Claire Julian as The Lady is quietly serene yet quite threatening.

Cara Ricketts as Maria in Twelfth Night

In the lobby of the Festival Theatre, the lightly swinging jazz duo of Don Englert on alto sax and Michael Wood on vibes plays on as we are eased, with the welcome and seductive sounds of their music adrift in the air, into our seats. Lights soon dim and a group of five rock-slanted musicians play themselves, one by one, onto the stage. The air is already quite ripe with music when Mike Shara as Duke Orsino declares, “If music be the food of love, play on/Give me excess of it” and it will stay that way all though director Des McAnuff’s celebratory and boldly eclectic production.

 In this musical atmosphere, whatever transpires is carried along as if on melodic lines. Everyone seems a musician in this land of Illyria-a piano appears out of the blue, of course the fool plays bass guitar, folks go a capella at will- where everyone seems to be a musician who sings background harmonies or duets when the mood or opportunity arises.  It’s an accepting world of sorts, both a play and much like an actual gig, where anything goes -unless your name is Malvolio, but then he’s such an unaccepting guy who kills enjoyment and spontaneity.

 The theatrically supportive music by McAnuff and co-composer Michael Roth might make reference to rock, MOR, and the rest, but it’s Debra Hanson’s set that is heavier metal with a gold-plated frame around multi-shaped mirror fragments, a metallic chandelier, and costumes of musicians metal-covered. The set is made of strong elements, like a large kneeling stone angel for one, that visually sustain McAnuff’s broad spectacle of fun, and costumes often reflect several eras in one single garment. Another nice touch is how musicians seem like trees popping up all about, as if the earth too is made of music.

 A major delight of this spirit-tickling production –other than Shakespeare’s use of suspense, misunderstandings, confusion, and happy resolution- is McAnuff’s knack with comic actors. We hear not spoken text but individual human voices in the characterizations, with words and phrases often shaped into delicious meanings. Many a character seems pivotal to the tale because each one is substantially realized and each comes with hilarious identifying qualities or, in the case of Sara Topham’s Olivia, accompanied by a Valkyre-like quartet.

 A number performances, like some situations, feel so freshly conceived and realized that they seem to glisten with dew. Ben Carlson is a quick and sour Jester Feste, a man with assertive and secure confidence,  a man quick  enough of mind to do subtle put downs that sometimes elude their victims. When Feste sings for us, we hope for a longer set, a CD. Tom Rooney is a rigid, humourless Malvolio, indeed a “churlish messenger” with a furrowed brow and a confrontational attitude. He is a man of limited spirit who brings no happiness, a man who is smugly dismissive like a social crab.

 Cara Ricketts brings both an extroverted femininity and a spritely sexiness to Maria.  She is a playful creature who helps to humiliate Malvolio, yet she is also a woman of linear elegance like a dancer, one infused with rays of feminine light that emanate from her presence. Sara Topham’s Olivia shows a secure authority through both her clipped delivery and her girlish twinkle.  She is self-indulgent in melodramatic feelings, made of inner energy wanting some place to go, and has the pleasing effect of a happy and delighted lightbulb.

 Brian Dennehy’s Sir Toby is bullish and plodding in his levity, a bloated dirty old guy, a somewhat repugnant, well, belch of a man who dominates space by his large figure and especially his unwavering manner. He’s a golfer too. Mike Shara’s Orsino, a man more inwardly directed than Toby, seems ever befuddled of mind, suggests a short fuse and speaks self-regardingly as if to mirrors. Steve Ouimette’s Aguecheek has a pummeled face, one that has been through the grinder of life, it seems. He is sluggish in enthusiasm, like a mentally challenged prune, and a memorable blend of seeming inner doubt and self-regard.

 In the central role of Viola, Suzy Jane Hunt does intriguing fill in for Andrea Runge, out with a bad back, who one assumes would have been an open-hearted and emotionally forward Viola. Hunt’s Viola, however, while not outwardly glowing with inner emotion nor overly expressive as a figure of authority, draws us consistently to her nonetheless. This Viola seems a woman of inherent sadness, reflective, distinctly rich with a quiet but intense passion. She has a quality of emotional aloofness that seems equally decisive and vulnerable at one go. A quality of yearning pervades her character. She ably fills the androgynous bill and suggests a sense of daring as she negotiates with her own heart. She keeps us curious and tuned in. We like her and feel concern about her.

In John Mighton’s The Little Years, Irene Poole’s performance as Kate is a haunting creation. Kate has lost the spark she once had, doesn’t say very much except for occasional terse comments spoken with blunt objectivity, and seems a frozen life, one not allowed to feel or even be any more. As a child, Kate shows passionate interest in scientific speculation, wants to “ discover  a particle from which all particles are made,” but she and  her passions are squashed in every way.

 Young Kate doesn’t do well in school because her learning rhythms are inconsistent with the mechanical fixed template of the educational system. Her inability to endure mediocrity, conformity, pretension, artificiality, boredom, intellectual containment and a tax on her spirit by mundane others leaves her no allies. She feels and will feel tolerated, embittered, frustrated and in time is subjected to electrotherapy in an institution. In adulthood she becomes hunched and tight.

 Chick Reid is Alice, a mother brewed in tradition who is proud of her son William’s success and doesn’t like that her daughter is a failure in school. Indeed she has Kate sent to vocational school where her daughter of deep intellectual passion and imagination will learn stenography, home economics or library sciences. For Alice, Kate’s purpose is to be a “wife and mother” and she is dismayed that Kate won’t play stupid to catch a guy. Later, as an adult, Kate forgoes a potential relationship because the guy is both a “stupid artist” and a “ condescending asshole”. Kate just can’t play the game that many women do.

 At one point, Kate declares, “If you think you can walk over hot coals, you can. It’s even easier to convince yourself that you can’t do something, that’s why schools exist”. It is a devastating comment and accurate condemnation of our insane educational system in which the progress toward lifeless mediocrity of spirit is inevitable for  too many in some significant way. Mighton and director Chris Abraham succeed in making such tragedy intimately relevant to each of us; after all, who has not been destroyed somehow by going to school.

 The cast is exceptional. Poole and Reid are chilling, Bethany Jillard as young Kate and later Kate’s niece is constantly fresh with detail, Evan Buliung compactly pinpoints the subtleties of aging, Yanna McIntosh keeps Grace’s humanity genuine, and the rest of the cast are precise and economic with life-revealing details. Like all humane productions, this one is a compassionate mirror to the lives we live or have lived and it maintains an air of authenticity throughout.

In one year, as a teen, about twenty years after the Great Depression’s end, I read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, saw John Ford’s film of the novel, and heard Ramblin’ Jack Elliot at a club sing Tom Joad by his legendary mentor Woody Guthrie who had grown up in Oklahoma’s dust bowl. My own parents had endured the depression’s drought and a precarious farm existence in the 30s, and the memories that haunted them as a result have stayed in my bones to this day. Therefore, thus influenced, I feel much enthusiasm and one or two specific doubts about Frank Galati’s adaptation of Steinbeck at the Avon.

To begin with one of the outstanding features of the production, Antoni Cimolino’s direction wastes no opportunity to mine human character, all the while placing the Joads and company evocatively in an epic dimension. His care with character-revealing detail in both lead and minor players repeatedly creates a compelling and textured production. Let me give two examples, both outside the main and spoken action. First, Tom sits with his back to the group and Rose of Sharon, still insecure with his return from prison, approaches him from behind and tentatively but lovingly places a jacket on his shoulders and then, burst free of caution, hugs him.

The second involves young Abigail Winter-Culliford as Ruthie and very young Gregor Reynolds as Winfield, both placed down stage when Ma reveals that Granma has died. Winfield in a quick glance looks imploringly at his sister with concise and precise hopelessness. Meanwhile, Ruthie in a few moments conveys shades of inner wonder at seeing California, unaffected compassion for Winfield, and sensitivity to the many human pulsations around her. Earlier, Ruthie has lifted a sack- of flour? – and thrown it onto the truck and in one grimace and strain you know it is quite heavy.

Ironically, Evan Buliung as Tom Joad, Tom McCamus as Jim Casey, and Chilina Kennedy as Rose of Sharon, in their expert fusion of human depth and its mythic implication, expose the play’s Achilles heel. On one hand, we have a complex and profoundly subtle exploration of human suffering and dignity in these and the other characters and, on the other, we have the same play doing a surface treatment O, Okie where art thou?

Buliung makes “ordinary” an art because we sense in subtle clues his struggle to understand brutal injustice. He embodies human vulnerability edging toward self-respect and becomes a quintessential everyman who is firmly present as an individual but who also mirrors and stands for his surrounding social conditions. His face slowly reveals internal pain, humiliation and growing rage. He is assertively average but becomes epic with the realization that “They’re working on our decency”.

The Casey of Tom McCamus is thinking all the time and like Tom and Ma, his thoughts are not abstractions but slowly evolving response to a dire social situation. Casey’s presence is solid and easy, with wisdom being the heart of the man. He is the play’s thematic anchor and its symbolic narrative because he progresses from victim to activist, from man of spiritual struggle to man who finds spirit in human struggle against social and economic pressure. His struggle for purpose, and not the musicians’ lyrics, are the play’s inherent chorus.

Chilina Kennedy’s Rose of Sharon is quietly volatile, a young woman not so much naïve as inexperienced, not so much a victim as a seed of human hope. If memory serves me correctly, Steinbeck has a scene with a turtle on its back on the highway trying to right itself and escape potential danger. Such is Rose of Sharon’s and all the other Okies’ progress, from hopelessness to self created salvation. When Rose of Sharon nurses a dying stranger, we sense a purpose much larger that he and she in this deed of mercy. We see the reason for life and it is a truly beautiful theatrical moment.

John Arnone’s set and Steven Hawkins’ lighting design and Carolyn Smith’s costumes all contribute to a striking visual experience of human hopelessness with implied salvation. We have a panoramic sunrise or sunset behind potently evocative setting devices: four posts suggest a countryside, a doorway suggests a wood frame house, and signs of poverty abound and make their effect in dark dirty hues in clothing and makeshift tents. Cimolino accentuates the latter with a mother picking lice from her child’s hair.

Although the economical text suggests inner character through select details and although Cimolino takes great pains that his characters speak fluently in their silences, I find that these features are diluted somewhat in the overall tone of the play. The brutality of the “red” – obsessed thugs in California becomes somewhat incidental, stylized and thus almost neutral in effect. At one point, the sad story by the Man Going Back of starving children with bloated bellies is followed by a functional song about route 66 that serves narrative purpose in general terms but kills the horrid story’s impact.

The play in Cimilino’s production has two outstanding realizations of an everyman figure, both played memorably by Buliung and McCamus. With flavour-generating performances like those of Randy Hughson, Janet Wright, Victor Ertmanis, Peter Hutt, and the rest, the commentary in the songs’ lyrics seems often unnecessary. Certainly, though, when the very capable instrumentalists weave melodic lines and harmonies throughout the play’s progress, they as such contribute to the production’s texture.

The lead singer, however, although he has a pleasing and versatile voice, deliberately misuses it with deviation into a conspicuous mannerism, very much unlike the actors. It’s folkie affectation, one that evolved after the folk boom of the 60s but has no origin in the music of the 30s. As noted already, the fine cast we have here can and should stand on its own without being undermined. There is so much that is haunting and memorable in this production and also two glitches that make one wonder if the play is trying to avoid its potentially devastating impact.