James Strecker Reviews the Arts

“It’s just a course,” says Prof John. He speaks from the world of academic concept where he, on the verge of tenure, is secure, assertive, intellectually confident, professorally efficient, and a man of patronizing empathy. Yes, he is annoying. But when Carol, his student comes to discuss a paper on which she has done poorly, he seems automatically genuine, whatever his reasons, in his desire to help her.

Carol is hesitant, vulnerable, uncomprehending of his implications, ironies, and vocabulary, and seems out of her depth in academia. “I did what you told me,” she protests, desperate to pass a course on which her future depends. She concludes, “I’m stupid,” slouched. He cannot find a language that works with her and in no way do they understand each other. She takes everything literally. The tension is unsettling and we’re only a few minutes into David Mamet’s play.

Carol in her frustration –she shortly has a tantrum- is icily defiant and picks the most damning of potential meanings in what John says. Her interpretations of seemingly innocent remarks and behavior begin to sound accusational, but in his cluelessness he for some reason opens up to her candidly about himself and the “system.” He calls tests “a joke” and pontificates conceptually. But life is based on self-preservation, not concepts,
and Carol writes down everything he says.

In the end, John’s tenure and his new home and his life are all shipwrecked because a now black-suited Carol, seated with erect posture and with a supportive group behind her, has the system on her side to persecute John as pedantic, sexist, elitist, and much else. Carol has quoted his remarks verbatim, and when he calls these accusations, she is brutal is insisting they are facts. Now he is vulnerable, now she can assert, “What I say is right”. Now she can accuse, “You know what you’ve worked for? Power.” Now it is she who can inform the professor that she is going “to instruct” him.

The Soulpepper production is intense, unrelenting, and acted memorably by both Diego Matamoros and Sarah Wilson with disturbing accuracy. One will question how the inarticulate Carol of the beginning, a young woman who is pointedly conceptually-challenged (please note this politically correct description), can later orate, with remarkable fluidity and seething articulaton and viscious condescension, the position of the socially, economically and sexually oppressed. I’ve seen productions where Carol seemed to be spouting her “ism” by rote, but here she has the presence and skills of a lawyer, so one wonders at the director’s intent. Was she playing “stupid” at the outset? Does power make one articulate and able?

Of course, this modern classic takes on political correctness for all its justification and absurdity. So Carol screams, “It is not for you to say that an arm on the shoulder was not sexual” and shortly accuses John of rape because he did hold her shoulders. She demands that he remove books she finds offensive from his course and, overhearing John’s phone conversation with his wife, orders him with “Don’t call your wife baby.” The dreaded but anticipated result is that John does indeed beat up Carol and scream “You little cunt!”
It’s hard to convey the force of Mamet’s Oleanna, especially in regard to this superbly acted and directed production of Soulpepper’s, without going into all this detail. Every word is food for examination; every nuance disturbs deeply for what it implies about human nature, our system of both economy and education, the implicit sexism in our culture, the underpinning of power in every human relationship, our behavior, every word we speak and, yes, our obsession with political correctness. I did hear of one claim that this play exaggerates the truth and that such things don’t or can’t happen. Yes, they do. And if you think otherwise, you a part of the problem, or maybe all of it. Essential –don’t miss…..and take a teacher.

As terrifying as it is, “the spirit world” that torments Joseph Ziegler’s Scrooge, in Soulpepper’s enthusiastically heartwarming A Christmas Carol, might be, ironically, a preferable fit for the man. The corporeal world, after all, is a pleasure-less place for him and he humbugs life, and its people, because he doesn’t know how to live it. He doesn’t join in because he is afraid and doesn’t know how to move among other people. He doesn’t know how to hear what they say. Still, more to the point, this Scrooge seems a man, via Ziegler, who senses perhaps that he might have a humane heart and the thought unsettles him.

Why? Not because he is just a mean and nasty guy, but because a heart is something alien that he can’t understand, he can’t control. It’s not numbers ink-written on a ledger, it’s not a coin in the hand, it’s not an employee or debtor he can bully into shape. A heart is something that might welcome intangible but demanding spirits of conscience and, in turn, lure one into the unknown. This Scrooge, however, invests his daring carefully and doesn’t speculate in stocks of the ethereal world. He wants to play it safe and so he blocks out people and the human warmth and imprecise values they imply with their kind words and deeds. It’s life he blocks out because he just doesn’t know how to get in.

Scrooge here is a man who handles metallic money and is appropriately a body of cold steel, one that stands like a “resolute” and unrelenting deity of inhumanity. He also suggests an inner pain, one that enrages him into meanness, shapes his rigid being. Note how alienated he seems when, with the Ghost of Christmas Past at his side, he attempts some high-kicking dance and in turn looks bewildered. There’s a poignant air of desperation in his awkwardness. Still, he is a classic mean shit or, according to Mrs. Cratchit, an “odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man” and Ziegler gives him a spiritually cancerous tone. And isn’t the greatest tragedy a man who isn’t connected to the potential of his own humanity. Appropriately, Ziegler is an actor of proportion and no excess, one whose every move hits the mark as it emerges subtly from abundant resources of human understanding. This is a very complex Scrooge.

Bob Cratchit, on the other hand, heartbreakingly underplayed by Oliver Dennis, is decency incarnate, a man of wounded tenderness, especially at the side of his dead son. One feels awed by his spontaneous and unforced goodness. The day to day sorrow in the eyes and manner of Bob and Mrs. Cratchit, the latter played with subtle sadness in her DNA by Deborah Drakeford, is deeply touching. Both have faces that tell lifetimes. Matthew Edison too gives a compelling layered performance as Mr. Fred and the younger actors, like Alyson MacFarlane, seem naturally attuned to their familial context and also to their individuality. Some are very young and we believe them all, whatever their respective ages.

If this Soulpepper production achieves the thrust of literary narrative (well, yes, of course) and tells a good tale, it is also fluidly balletic in its physical realization. Note the elasticity of movement, how the Harlequins especially weave like human threads, like strands of ethereal imagination, or how director Michael Shamata makes his dramatic points physically in, for example, Marley’s weighted steps that echo a weighed down soul. Others, feeling their quiet joy of existence move with sweeping and authoritative serenity. Shamata is a director who, with incisive economy, finds many brief means to emotional effect and often a simple gesture tells a chapter in this tale of Christmas. He and his actors create a world which we, the audience, easily inhabit with them.

This Soulpepper production of A Christmas Carol unfolds dynamically in simultaneous dimensions and that is one key to its charm and emotional appeal. We experience the worldly poverty of starving families and poorhouses, the turmoil of a messed up and tortured psychology in Scrooge, the beneficence of human kindness from many quarters, the magic of a very conceivable supernatural torment, the palpable and unembarrassed strength of innocence in an indifferent world, the profound beauty of love as we see it at the Cratchit Christmas table, the seductive spell of imagination using bodies and voices to speak like water or like stone.

And there’s the dancing, especially the grand physicality and insane joie de vivre of Kevin Bundy and Maggie Huculak swirling and leaping like potent and unstoppable forces of nature. Miss Huculak, with her red and white striped dress and whirlwind kicks as high as the sky, with her smile lit bright as three days of summer light, remains embedded in my mind as a living and breathing icon of joy. A Christmas Carol is certainly a profound tale of spiritual redemption that warms our hearts but, on a cold winter night, this lady joyfully explodes with primordial fire that tells us not how we should live, but why. That’s quite a potent antidote to the greedy and mean-spirited folk one will inevitably encounter, in due course, the next day as the world goes on.

Albert Schultz’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is so exquisitely unforced, so subtly true to human desperation, so consistently acted with unfailing integrity by an exemplary cast, that its beauty hurts without relief. As Willy Loman first enters his home in darkness, the sound of a flute permeates the air and gives his presence a lingering ghostly quality on the verge of dissolution. It seems a life drifting by. We witness the relationship of Willy and his supportive wife, Linda, and note the introverted quality of two lives losing their bearings. As an audience, we are not watching, we are intruding. Their two adult sons, simultaneously before us, share a bedroom as they did when they were lads. Happy, we learn, has screwed the girlfriends of three executives with whom he is getting even. Biff, his qualitative opposite, is one to seek the purpose of his life, one to live inwardly. As lads, they revered and heeded their dad who advised, “Be liked” and thus they would thrive. As adults, however, watching their lives and their dad’s fall into ruin of no purpose, they now know better.

Nancy Palk’s Linda is loyal, quietly accommodating, a contained greyish presence that is both support and outlet for Willy in his ongoing frustration. It is a poignant interpretation as she tries, beyond her ability, to smooth each rough edge in the family’s tense life and to nurse her husband’s sinking self-esteem. She fits into the lives of others as needed and, because playwright Miller is acutely sensitive to all places where human dignity can be wounded, she is constantly needed. Palk’s Linda is a woman whose identity is founded on the support she gives to others and because she does all she can, she cannot understand why her efforts are not enough. The familial ship sinks no matter what she does. It takes subtle understanding of character to find complexity in Linda’s lack of comprehension, and Palk has it.

Joseph Ziegler’s Willy is indeed “a little boat looking for a harbor,” a man whose constant urge to succeed through likability denotes a frustratingly small life without a centre. The system he worked to create no longer needs him and Ziegler’s take on a now discarded Willy’s humiliation is detailed with nuance and painfully memorable. He does indeed seem tired at the core and unable to maintain even his shallow standards of dignity. He does indeed seem a man of lifelong loneliness in constant need of approval. In Willy’s decidedly ordinary existence, his recourse is to pipe dreams, to quiet irritation, to attempts at being known -we know this man. Ziegler gives Willy an epic dimension because we detect no attempt to do so on his part, no actor’s reach for meaning. It hurts to watch Ziegler’s (and Miller’s) Willy because we see the hopeless parts of ourselves we’d prefer unspoken.

In two words “ Yah, Pop” Ari Cohen as Biff is eager, obedient and self-destructive at one go, a lad whose total submission to his father’s superficial ideals leads to total disillusionment when he finds his dad with a woman other than his idealized mom. And his ironically freeing realization is that “We have been living a lie for fifteen years”. Biff has always been judged by his dad and now, as he is forced to judge his dad, his old self is destroyed. One tragedy here is that Willy can’t or can’t dare to understand Biff’s father-damning realization that “I am nothing, Pop.” But it is a declaration of existential freedom in the face of Willy who has never been free of the dream that takes him nowhere. The enthusiastic and shallow Happy, played with insightful precision by Tim Campbell, reveals an unsettling emptiness of values. Something of a stud, he is unsatisfied in everything he does and Campbell nails Happy’s inability to think beyond his condition to cause and solution. He is a Willy-in-waiting and, because we know his end, deeply disturbing. We want him to wake up to truth, to see some potential in his life, but he can’t. As with Bif, we feel that Happy lives filial pain.

Lorenzo Savoini’s set is certainly cramped, so overlapping movement at times seems awkward and confusing. On the other hand, the set does act as a psychological mirror of the collective and cluttered emotional mind of the Loman family. One example of Albert Schultz’s acute feeling for Miller’s masterwork is that people touch one another, embrace one another, as we in the audience come to realize that no embrace is strong enough when the other is consumed by the American lie posing as a dream. At Willy’s grave Linda asks “Why didn’t anyone come?” but, in the end, the point is that attention has not been paid and the inhuman capitalistic machine that shaped Willy’s dream and his tragically logical demise has made another killing.