FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.


The truth is way out there
Garry Theatre brings an abstract unsolved mystery to the stage
by Lori Montgomery

Scotland Road
directed by Sharon Pollock
The Garry Theatre

With all of the hoopla surrounding One Yellow Rabbit's High Performance Rodeo (honestly, is there anyone in town who doesn't know that it's happening?), it might be easy to forget that just a few blocks east on 9th Avenue, an increasingly close-knit group of local actors put on an increasingly polished show every few weeks at the Garry Theatre. This time around it's Scotland Road by Jeffrey Hatcher, a play with a plot reminiscent of some episodes of X-Files.

A young woman (Melanie Windle) is discovered in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in April of 1996 , wearing 19th-century clothing and speaking only one word: "Titanic." An expert on the first and last voyage of the Titanic, John Aster (Rob Kirik), brings the woman to Maine, hoping to find out whether she is what she appears to be - a survivor of the doomed ship which sank in 1912.

Unfortunately, he doesn't find out much of anything in the first act - and neither does the audience. The mystery woman can't, or won't, say a word, and the unpleasantly arrogant Aster spends the first half of the play browbeating her to no avail. When the lights come up on the second act, though, it's an entirely different play. Where the first act poses the same questions over and over and essentially goes nowhere, the second act - while certainly not answering all of the questions - attacks the issue of why Aster is so intent on asking them.

Director Sharon Pollock allows the supporting cast to remain farly flat, so the other two characters in the play exist purely as devices, but Kirik and Windle give strong, dynamic performances. Windle rises to meet the challenge of remaining speechless in act one, and makes a remarkably smooth transition to verbosity in act two. Kirik starts out blustering in the way that Garry audiences have come to expect from him, but in act two, his character is much more textured with a straightforward vulnerability.

The Garry season is an eclectic one and this play is perhaps more abstract than some others in its lack of solid resolution, but it's accessible enough and well worth the effort.

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