THEATRE REVIEW: AND SLOWLY BEAUTY…



JOHN COULBOURN, Special to TorSun
28 FEB 2013
R: 4/5

TORONTO - One of the first things one learns about art — great art, at least — is that it doesn’t so much imitate life as illuminate it. And once that lesson has been well learned, it keeps us going back to the theatre, the ballet, the opera, the symphony, the library and the gallery for the rest of our lives, looking for further proof.
 But in a new play by Michel Nadeau, titled AND SLOWLY BEAUTY… we are asked to imagine what life might be like if we had never learned that lesson — if we had risen (rather than grown) to middle age without ever experiencing the almost electric shock of recognition we get when we see elements of our own lives reflected in the art of others. AND SLOWLY BEAUTY… opened at the Tarragon Wednesday, in an English language translation by Maureen Labonté, a co-production of Vancouver’s Belfry Theatre and Ottawa’s National Arts Centre English Theatre.


It’s the story of Mr. Mann, played here as a character treatise on the many shades of grey by Dennis Fitzgerald. In his late 40s,  Mann is a middle-aged, middle-level Quebec-based bureaucrat who discovers theatre only when he wins a pair of tickets to a production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, playing at a local theatre. With the rest of his family — his wife, beautifully played by Caroline Gillis, his daughter, played by Celine Stubel and his son, played by Shawn Ahmed — caught up in their own lives, he attends the theatre by himself and soon finds himself inadvertently caught up in the reflections of his own life he sees in Chekhov’s timeless masterpiece.


Initially, bemused as he is with the what he perceives as the meaninglessness of his own life and the sudden terminal illness of a long-time colleague (Christian Murray), Mann is not thrilled with what he’s seen, although he treasures the experience. Then, slowly through the intervention of a kindly waitress in a local coffee bar (Mary-Colin Chisholm in a performance that, in and of itself, lives up to the title of this play), he begins to see how his life and the lives of those around him are part of something much, much larger than anything he has ever imagined.


While Fitzgerald’s task is limited to a single role, albeit a large and demanding one, his castmates are asked to double as co-workers, fellow citizens, and even the cast of the play that so enchants our Mr. Mann, moving  through the story and John Ferguson’s wonderful  set — a wonderful mix of fun-house and gallery —  in a simple but stately choreography imposed by director Michael Shamata. 
And though the production —  clocking in at two hours without an intermission — is certainly filled with enough frissons of theatrical truth to win over an audience composed of theatrical neophytes like Mr. Mann, one suspects a more seasoned theatre-goer might find himself wishing that director Shamata had opted to cut a little closer to the emotional bones of the tale.