THEATRE REVIEW: THE LIST
15 Oct'10

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Toronto audiences take notice when a Tremblay play blows in from Quebec to take up residence on one of our local stages -- but usually, a Tremblay play means it's the handiwork of the celebrated Quebecois playwright Michel Tremblay. But now, it seems, there is a new Tremblay on the Quebec theatre scene, offering work that is, in its way, every bit as compelling as that other guy.

Her name is Jennifer Tremblay, and she earned a French-language Governor General's Award in 2008 for a play titled THE LIST -- a play since translated into English by Shelley Tepperman and now enjoying its Toronto première on the stage of the Berkeley Street Theatre. THE LIST opened Thursday, a co-production of Nightwood Theatre and Canadian Stage.

It's a simple enough story, told in monologue, as an unnamed woman goes about the mundane routine of daily life -- a life she tries to keep from spinning off the rails by constructing ever more elaborate lists as bulwarks against the emptiness that threatens to engulf and consume her.

Played by Allegra Fulton, she is a complex piece of work, unhappily married and trapped in a small town she despises, waiting for a husband she no longer really likes to come home from his job in the city and relieve the tedium of a small town life spent chasing after children with whom she can't connect and ticking items off her endless list of things that must be done or should be done or might be done. Not surprisingly, when the only friend she has made in the small town she calls home -- an earth-mother type named Caroline who simply strolls into her life -- asks a favour from her, that favour becomes part of our narrator's daily list, constantly being shifted aside by other seemingly more pressing concerns. Tragedy ensues, and our narrator is left to sort out and to list the ways she has contributed to a tragedy that now seems to dominate her life.

For all that it is built around a bit of a shaky premise -- the favour in question does not, ultimately, involve anything so complex that the ill-fated Caroline couldn't do it for herself, after all -- director Kelly Thornton gives us a compelling production here.

She sets the work in a kitchen, suspended somewhere between reality and the darkest corners of her narrator's mind -- a spotless, sterile, almost sub-Arctic environment created by designer Denyse Karn and lit by Kimberly Purtell. Together they create a breathtakingly claustrophobic world, frosted by madness -- a world that, despite all its cool elegance, telegraphs a sense of oppressive and manic desperation that is hypnotic.

That same desperation fuels Fulton's performance as she stalks around that set, seemingly stranded on the thin edge of hysteria, contemplating an endless sea of unhappiness. But while Fulton, with her sweeping array of talents, seems initially to be perfectly cast, she is an actress who, despite a few projection problems on opening night, seems only capable of inhabiting the big moments, investing everything with so much anguish that we are forced to keep her at an emotional remove, caught up as we are in the performance and not the character. In consequence, we not only fail to understand the full depth of her friendship with Caroline and how it developed, we fail to feel the full anguish of her loss and guilt.

Finally, few are likely to argue that Fulton, under Thornton's direction, does a superb job of finding her way into this character. But at least a few of us are likely to leave wishing she'd hadn't sealed up all the entrances once she got there.