THEATRE REVIEW - SUCH CREATURES 22 Jan'10
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Creature discomforts

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
22 Jan '10

If Hollywood were to tell the story of playwright Judith Thompson's career so far, Wednesday's opening of SUCH CREATURES in the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace might have provided a dream ending.

Theatre Passe Muraille, after all, is where Thompson exploded onto the Toronto theatre scene 30 years ago with her first play, CRACKWALKER. Now, after three decades on a roller coaster of hits and misses, it is to Passe Muraille she has returned, no doubt hoping to build on the international success of PALACE OF THE END by adding another sparkling hit to a crown whose lustre has been dulled by a few too many rhinestones over the years.

But, as usual, there's a gap between the kind of happy endings and new beginnings Hollywood serves up, and the kind featured in real life. And while there are brief flashes of Thompson's artistry scattered throughout the play, SUCH CREATURES fails finally to coalesce into a meaningful theatrical experience.

As she did in PALACE AT THE END, Thompson once more sets out to explore the theatrical monologue. But whereas PALACE featured three distinct, separate voices, CREATURES contents itself with only two, upping the ante by inter-weaving them for a final effect that remains largely obscure despite the best efforts of the cast, director Brian Quirt and, finally, apparently even the playwright.

The first of CREATURES' two voices belongs to young Bernadette, also known as Blandy, a tough and troubled young woman fighting to navigate and survive both the mean streets of Toronto and the meaner halls of its schools in one of its rougher areas.

As Blandy, Michaela Washburn does everything in her considerable power to give her her character authenticity. But she is constantly tripped up by a playwright who fails to trust her audience enough and who insists, instead, on laying out Blandy's vulnerability on a platter, rather than allowing it to blossom slowly on its own. Although she tries mightily to master the cadences of teenage alienation, the voice Thompson has created for Blandy rarely rings true, sounding for all the world like it's been filtered through a middle class consciousness to remove not just the profanity, but the rough edges as well.

The second voice belongs to Sorele, played here by Maria Vacratsis.

A survivor of the Nazis' relentless death machine, and fighting cancer for the third time in her long life, Sorele has returned to Poland and the death camp she survived, in the hope that in reliving the huge horrors and the minor triumphs she endured there, she can find the courage for one more fight.

Rooted in real life, Sorele's tale demands to be presented with simple human dignity and honesty but, under Thompson's hand, it is so overwritten that it is transformed into something tailored far more for the eye than the mouth or ear.

As a result, not even an actress of Vacratsis' considerable skill can make the words her own

To the naked eye and heart, what ties these two disparate women together, of course, is their courage in the face of adversity. And while Thompson seems to acknowledge that in passing, she tries to link them as well through a shared love of the language of Shakespeare - a language ironically bowdlerized here from THE TEMPEST to give the play its title.

In Blandy's case, her passion for Romeo's words, believable as it may be, seems terribly contrived, while in Sorele's it is strangely incidental, seemingly imposed as an excuse to use the aforementioned title.

Instead of affording Thompson a triumphal return to the stages of TPM, SUCH CREATURES simply underlines the fact that as a playwright, she has lost her way more than a few times in her 30-year career, and returning to a theatre is not the same as finding your way home.