TORONTO - Even though it spans 90 minutes, there is still some truth in packaging in Kristen Thomson's latest play, The Patient Hour, in that in the viewing, the final 60 minutes are likely to tax your patience in the extreme.
The Patient Hour opened Wednesday in the Tarragon Extra Space -- the same space that, coincidentally, saw the debut of Thomson's much-lauded I, Claudia back in 2001.
But where that production soared on the wings of Thomson's incredible acting talents, this one keeps the playwright firmly behind the scenes, providing a showcase for the impressive skills of four other talented performers instead.
The stage is not, however, a Thomson-free zone, for the playwright's brother Todd makes his Tarragon debut in a pivotal role, turning in such a deft characterization that geneticists could no doubt add an additional chapter or two to the "Nature vs. Nurture" debate by simply comparing the siblings' talents.
Thomson frere is cast as Charles, the grown son of the stroke victim in whose hospital room The Patient Hour is set.
He has come to visit his mother -- and as he chats with her, it becomes clear that the audience is seeing him through his mother's eyes, thanks to Julie Fox's set design, which places the unseen hospital bed and the patient it holds off stage, precisely where the audience is sitting.
And as Charles carries on an enforced and awkwardly one-sided conversation with the patient and therefore us, it becomes obvious that his mother's medical condition has rendered her incommunicado -- a condition which may or may not pass.
As time goes by, and as more people arrive and depart -- Charles' strange and apparently estranged sister, Laura (Waneta Storms) who may or may not have returned from a stint in jail, an efficient and compassionate nurse (Liisa Repo-Martell and a rather fey and tragic fellow patient (Patricia Fagan) -- it becomes abundantly clear that the prognosis is not good.
What is transpiring on stage -- the tentative courtship between the grieving son and the nurse, the prickly rapprochement between brother and sister notwithstanding -- has become a death watch.
And as anyone who has ever endured one of those will tell you, death watches can be tedious, painful affairs, rendered endurable only by the love and affection we bear for the person departing -- and then only barely.
Which is problematic here, for the only things we know about the about-to-be dear departed are the few things that Charles and Laura have told us in between their sibling spats or that we have garnered from the monologues in which they fight off their understandable self-pity long enough to attempt to coax their mother back to the land of the living.
And frankly, that's not enough to make us care.
Add to that the fact that the whole play seems to have been written on shifting sands and that none of the characters, save for Repo-Martell's carefully drawn June, is who they appear to be.
We get scant help here from director Chris Abraham's cinematic style of staging, in which one scene bleeds into another in such a way that it is often hard to establish who is really in the room at any given time or even, in one scene, who is in the bathroom, doing what.
In the end, Thomson touches on a lot of moving themes, not the least of which is the fact that even in the face of death, life goes on.
The problem is, even with the aid of a wonderfully competent cast, she doesn't strike those chords deeply enough within her audience that we feel comfortable sharing these most intimate moments with a bunch of strangers.
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