THEATRE REVIEW:
BETWEEN THE SHEETS

JOHN COULBOURN,
Special to TorSun
21 SEPT 2012
R: 4/5



Pictured: Christine Horne, Susan Coyne

TORONTO - In drama, as in engineering, a triangle has proven itself, time and time again, to be a hugely dependable building block. So, fledgling playwright Jordi Mand doesn’t explore much new ground in BETWEEN THE SHEETS, a play about a love triangle that had its world première in the Tarragon Theatre’s Extra Space Thursday. In setting up a confrontation between the wife and mistress of a philandering husband, Mand is definitely ploughing familiar turf, dramatically speaking.

Happily, the strength of this work can be found not so much in the ground the playwright turns over, as the contemporary perspectives she unearths along the way. Set in the classroom of a private school, the play starts late in the afternoon, as Teresa, a young teacher played with spot-on awkwardness and touching commitment by Christine Horne, prepares to call it a day after a slew of parent-teacher interviews.

But before she can depart, Marion (a cooly elegant and edgy Susan Coyne), the mother of one of Teresa’s young students, arrives, all brittle and patronizing efficiency, despite the fact she is clearly late. She is, it develops, hugely annoyed, perhaps because she seems to have been cut out of the loop in discussion regarding the progress of her only child.

As the two women circle each other with ill-concealed hostility, however, it becomes clear there is much more at stake here than good grades. What initially seems to be a problem of communication between Marion and her husband is revealed as something far deeper — and as we learn about the affair between him and the young teacher half his age, things initially seem to be falling into a dramatic rut.

But not for long, as the playwright and director Kelly Thornton conspire to make this old story very much of today, picking the scabs off the guilty wounds contemporary working mothers have been receiving, some of them self-inflicted, and examining in ways both stark and moving, the pain of biological clocks transformed for whatever reason into a time bomb.

From two very gifted performers, Thornton draws strong performances, allowing each to don the time-worn roles of victim and victimizer before casting those roles aside in recognition that neither can be tailored to fit either woman in this modern world. Wounded as they may be by the struggle in which they are engaged, each of them is forced to confront the role she has played in her own wounding, even while she is made intimately aware of the pain the other is experiencing.

Thanks to the performance quality, audience sympathy careers back and forth between each of the women, compassion forcing everyone to the very edge of their seats. If the play has a problem — and obviously this writer feels it does — it comes in an ending in which the playwright, having made us care deeply about both women, abandons them both in an ending that would seem utterly hopeless. A fair reflection of life perhaps, but also, finally, a helluva place to leave an audience.