 |
In reflecting a world where truth is so often far stranger than fiction, it falls to the playwright to order things so that an audience can accept them as truth, regardless of how farfetched they might be.
We'll leave it to literary scholars to judge the truth of The Gwendolyn Poems, but few could argue with the theatrical truth that playwright Claudia Dey has created in her exploration of the life and work of the late Gwendolyn MacEwen. The play opened at the Factory Theatre Wednesday night.
In a landscape rich in metaphor and madness, Dey re-creates both the life and the tortured soul of the Toronto-based poet, opening windows on her personal life and her often tortured professional life to illuminate her most enduring legacy -- her art.
Fortunately, that truth is embraced by most of the play's impressive cast, under the direction of Eda Holmes.
As MacEwen, Brooke Johnson fills her performance with the vivid angles and edges of the poet's mind, aging herself largely on the strength of her performance alone.
So too does Barbara Gordon in a brave and touching performance as MacEwan's achingly mad mother, Elsie, and Jerry Franken works a quiet magic as her drunken father Alick.
As Nikos, MacEwen's Greek love, Tony Nappo turns in a beautifully nuanced performance filled with passion and inarticulate despair.
As Milton Acorn, MacEwen's first husband, however, David Fox is completely out of control -- a cuckoo loose in a nest of beautiful and timid finches.
Having never met Acorn, this may or may not be a truthful representation, although the odds of anyone in real life just happening to embody so many of the cheap tricks and tics that mark Fox's performance are astronomical.
Whether or not there is truth in Fox's performance is irrelevant, however, for what is missing is dramatic truth -- a moment, however fleeting, that might justify to a mystified audience, the marriage between two such disparate individuals.
Unfortunately, Fox's histrionics dominate most of the first act of the play, overshadowing both Dey's muscular but poetic command of the language and all of the other performers.
So it isn't until the second act that the charms of this play begin to blossom on a efficient and functional set designed by David Boechler and lit by Michael Kruse.
It is testament to the accomplishments of the playwright, the director, and the rest of the cast that it remains worth seeing, despite Fox's best efforts.