THEATRE REVIEW: HUSH
19 Feb'10

'Hush' dreams up night terrors

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

TORONTO - All parents, it seems, have dreams for their children -- and, on occasion, just about as many have nightmares because of them. The number of parents who share nightmares with their children is no doubt substantially smaller.

Which means that playwright Rosa Laborde is exploring new turf in HUSH, a new play that made its world premiere in the Tarragon Extra Space on Wednesday. It's the same space where a successful production of her play LEO pushed her career into overdrive a few seasons ago, landing her the position of playwright-in-residence at the theatre.

At its most basic, HUSH is the story of single father Harlem (the Shaw Festival's Graeme Somerville, paying a welcome return visit to the Toronto stage) and his 12-year-old daughter, Lily (Vivien Endicott-Douglas). Lily is a preternaturally glib creature, poised on the brink of womanhood and suddenly suffering from night terrors.

In a dreamscaped script that plays fast and loose with time and place, Laborde makes getting to know her two protagonists a complex task that consumes most of the 80 minutes of the play. For his part, Harlem is a dentist and an icily cool existentialist, determined to raise his beloved only child free of superstition and other religious bugaboos. While fiercely overprotective of his apparently motherless daughter, he is also obviously in way over his head when it comes to parenting, and is consequently grateful for the attachment that has sprung between Lily and his colleague Andre, played by Conrad Coates.

But he also appears to be so caught up in a troubled relationship with the strange and exotic Talia (Tara Rosling) that he fails to notice that the attachment between Andre and Lily has crossed some sort of invisible line -- a transgression he is about to make as well. For when his precocious child starts having nightmares into which he somehow, inexplicably, finds his way, he discovers that Andre is playing a leading (if somewhat racially cliched) role in those dreams. Belatedly, Harlem sets out to establish a few limits, with less-than-impressive results, uniting Andre and Lily in opposition.

Meanwhile, his strange relationship with the odd and needy Talia seems to be spiraling out of control in some sort of parallel universe. And in the middle of it all sits Lily, written by Laborde and played by Endicott-Douglas as some sort of pre-pubescent homage to Ellen Page and JUNO -- a sometimes delightful, more often annoying, mix of innocence, wisdom and childish self-involvement.

For a while, under the taut minimalism of Richard Rose's direction, it's a delightful game of guess-the-destination, played out on a simple set designed and brilliantly, even dreamily, lit by Trevor Schwellnus. In fact, in the early going, constrained performances from Somerville, Coates and Rosling more than compensate for the fact that Lily is simply too precocious by half, but eventually Laborde's dreamscape becomes so bewildering on the one hand, and so pat on the other, that you're simply grateful for the feel-good ending that ties it all up in a star-lit package.

With her earlier work, Laborde's writing hinted at an almost poetic brilliance that blossoms fully in HUSH, a play that also demonstrates her skill at dramatic construction. But even though her work successfully mixes past and present with theatrical effect, the only growth her characters seem to exhibit is arbitrarily imposed by the playwright, rather than arise from their experiences in the play.