THEATRE REVIEW:
THE HAPPY WOMAN

JOHN COULBOURN,
Special to TorSun
07 MAR 2012
R: 2.5/5

Pictured: Maria Vacratsis, Maev Beaty

If one puts a pricetag on happiness, what price is considered simply too much to pay That’s the knotty — and sometimes naughty — question raised in playwright Rose Cullis’ THE HAPPY WOMAN, a new work that had its world première on the Berkeley Street Theatre’s mainstage in a Nightwood Theatre production Wednesday. And one suspects it is no accident that it opened on the eve of the annual celebration of International Women’s Day, for the lives it examines are, in the main, those of women in today’s modern and ever-evolving world.

In the course of the play, the four women involved — the relentlessly cheery Margaret (Barbara Gordon), her tough but fragile daughter Cassie (Maev Beaty), her frantically timid daughter-in-law, Stasia (Ingrid Rae Doucet) and her pragmatic and ever watchful neighbour, BellaDonna (Maria Vacratsis) — all find a level of happiness, even while their audience is left to wonder if each of them hasn’t paid too high a price for it.

It opens as Margaret cheerily greets another day, fairly babbling with happiness. Certainly, she may be a widow, but it’s a lovely day and she’s got her memories, her two healthy, happy grown children and a grandchild on the way, fathered by her eldest, Christian, played by Martin Happer. But after a brief game of half-empty vs. half-full with her watchful neighbour Bella Donna, the cracks in Margaret’s glass begin to show. Turns out her late husband was not the saint she so resolutely recalls, and further, that the couple’s two children are not the paragons their mother makes them out to be. Cassie, for her part, seems to be a bit of a sexual loose cannon trying to work out her problems through stripping as a performance artist, while Christian’s wife, Stasia, seems to be losing her tenuous grip on reality at the same time as he is running out of patience as her pregnancy progresses.

Through subsequent scenes, as we meet and get to know all of the characters involved, it turns out that Margaret has sacrificed much for her happiness, building a wall that obscures familial flaws that have all but destroyed the children she so deeply loves. But while Christian appears to be more than willing to share his mother’s fantasy of the perfect family, Cassie rebels and threatens to destroy them all.

Director Kelly Thornton conspires with designers Denyse Karn (sets and costumes) and Kimberley Purtell (lighting) to create the two distinct worlds of the play, painting Margaret and her family in almost lurid primary colours while rendering BellaDonna’s corner of the stage in  more anchored, earthy shades. But while the two distinct physical realities of the show are delineated, Thornton finds little to aid her or her actors in the human switches between the two worlds.

Not only is Gordon’s relentless chirpiness allowed to spill over into something approaching high camp, thus robbing her character of much-needed sympathy, Beaty’s often raw and courageous performance pieces lack the simple vulnerability to make them truly touching. Doucet, for her part, makes the most of a role that is little more than an unanchored victim, and while Happer and Vacratsis both do good work, they are finally simply the points on which the drama pivots and not the drama itself.

For all its comic book colours and chirpy cheerfulness, THE HAPPY WOMAN tackles tough and deeply disturbing subject matter — and in the end, says a lot about not only the price of happiness, but what makes for a happy life as well. But it is often said in ways that are either over or underwritten, by characters who, as written, come up short of three dimensions.