THE GOOD LIFE
Theatre Junction
Starring Brian Jensen, Shauna Baird, Duncan Ollerenshaw and Valerie Planche
Directed by Kevin McKendrick
February 5 to March 1
Betty Mitchell Theatre (Jubilee Auditorium)
"For whatever reason, we seem to be quite lucky and we have a good life together."
So says Dan about his life with Gena. They are both successful professionals and they have a comfortable, happy marriage. In contrast, their friends Chris and Mary fight continually and constantly teeter on the brink of divorce. For both couples, they are about to redefine the way they look at love, sex and commitment.
Theatre Junction’s upcoming production is the thought-provoking play The Good Life, the latest from award-winning Toronto playwright Daniel Brooks. Brooks is a familiar figure on the Toronto theatre scene as an actor and director, but he is best known for his writing. His plays Here Lies Henry, The Noam Chomsky Lectures and Insomnia have toured across the country and around the world.
Directed by Kevin McKendrick, the Theatre Junction production features a strong cast, with Brian Jensen and Shauna Baird as the contented Dan and Gena, and Duncan Ollerenshaw and Valerie Planche as the embattled Chris and Mary. The Good Life is a play of many levels. The action is rooted in the everyday details of relationships and marriage, but Brooks uses this as a stepping-off point to a more profound and often funny exploration of love and commitment.
Brooks takes his inspiration for his writing from ideas that have had a particular effect on his life. For The Good Life, he says his starting point was Plato’s Symposium.
"I want to explore ideas that have had an impact on me and I want to share them with an audience," says Brooks. "(I was drawn to) The Symposium, in terms of its literary techniques which are so are wonderful, sophisticated and beautiful, and how it looks at a congregation of people who are seriously trying to talk about something seriously and also light-heartedly."
Equally influential is Ingmar Bergman’s disturbing examination of married life in Scenes from a Marriage. The Good Life is almost a tribute to Bergman’s rigorous study of relationships and the dramatic tension infused in every scene.
"I saw Scenes from a Marriage many years ago, and there is a sense in that movie that within any scene one doesn’t know what will happen next – like in any human moment," Brooks observes. "It’s so eloquently and heartbreakingly expressed in that movie. Although looking back on our lives we very often see a conventional route, there is no road map."
Originally produced last year at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, Brooks is taking advantage of this new production to revise his script.
"It takes me a long time to write a play," he says. "When I started to write it I was interested in bigger ideas and using the theatre to discuss ideas and the drama was secondary. As a result the drama in the play just needed some development."
The Good Life carries us through the disintegration of a marriage, but the intention is never to make some simplistic moral judgement. Instead, Brooks uses his characters and their relationships as an opportunity for us to take a good, hard look at the current state of the institution.
"The way we are dealing with marriage and families is new," says Brooks. "We’re at a new point in cultural history. And so I’m showing a couple who are very much without any kind of guidelines. They come to some semi-conscious realization that its up to them to try to invent something for themselves." |
