Review
GLENN
Blacklist Theatre Project
Starring Trevor Leigh, Philip Warren Sarsons, Tim Koetting and Evan Rothery
Written by David Young
Directed by Kevin McKendrick
Runs until September 26
Downstairs Hall (Epcor Centre)
It says something about Calgary’s pool of acting talent that you can find, not one, but four fine actors capable of credibly impersonating and personifying Glenn Gould.
Tim Koetting, Trevor Leigh, Philip Warren Sarsons and Evan Rothery are, alone and together, a delight to watch as they play four ages and aspects of the great Canadian pianist in David Young’s witty, engagingly cerebral Glenn.
Physically, they all approximate Gould’s lean, hawk-like appearance and one is hard put to say who bears the closest resemblance to the musician. At first, I thought it was Sarsons who best embodied Gould with his weedily handsome grace, but then Leigh would turn his head at a certain angle and I was immediately reminded of a famous photo of Gould at the keyboard. And Rothery and Koetting, as the youngest and oldest manifestations, respectively, of the man, evoke Gould the oddball – by turns the pale, hypersensitive genius and the haggard, pill-popping hypochondriac.
As Shakespeare’s Jaques says, "one man in his time plays many parts," and in Young’s conception, Gould played four principal roles during his life: the Prodigy (Rothery), the Performer (Sarsons), the Perfectionist (Leigh) and the Puritan (Koetting). In the play’s musical structure, the four personae are also four themes that weave in and out of the piece and play off each other contrapuntally over the course of 32 short scenes that mimic the 32 sections of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Gould’s signature work.
So, while the play follows a rough chronology, it continually winds forward and back in time, or finds two or more Goulds in the same place at different times, e.g. sharing a taxicab in New York, both as a wide-eyed wunderkind on his first visit and as a disillusioned, middle-aged artist who has turned his back on the concert stage. The conceit makes sense, since much of the action takes place in Gould’s mind and all of it is presented from his point of view.
Rothery shows us Glenn as a gangly, ardent adolescent in Toronto, feverishly "decoding" the Goldbergs using dominoes, rapturously identifying with fellow night-owl Kafka and quarrelling with his mother. Sarsons is Glenn the international concert star, receiving critical accolades for his artistry and mockery for his dishevelled appearance and unabashedly sensual enjoyment of the music (this was in the button-down 1950s, when even Elvis was being censored for moving his hips).
Leigh gives voice to the Glenn who renounced live performing for the wonders of recording technology, while Koetting is the aging, increasingly reclusive Glenn, trying to embark on a new phase as a conductor without leaving Toronto or the studio. All four are linked by the traits that ran like a leitmotif throughout Gould’s life – his love of solitude, his fear of flying, his obsession with his health, his abnormal sensitivity to cold.
Still, even with four actors and two acts, Glenn has a hard time capturing its elusive subject – like those long, seemingly boneless hands of his, Gould is always fluttering just out of reach of the playwright’s transfixing pin. Yet this is the kind of play so packed with tasty morsels of biographical data and delicious quotes that it’s likely to send you off in search of a substantial book to satisfy your hunger – the latest being Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould by Kevin Bazzana.
Blacklist’s clean, well-lighted production is quite the visual contrast to the group’s last show, the seamy Being at Home with Claude. Kevin McKendrick’s direction is both imaginative and precise, staged on a black and white set by Martin Evans that suggests the keys of a piano, with a table painted with musical notations standing in for Gould’s Steinway or Chickering and a mountain range of white storage boxes upstage recalling both Gould the pack rat and the man who was drawn to the glacial purity of the Great White North. Sound designer Peter Moller blends Gould’s own playing with aural collages as fragmentary as the play’s narrative, and costume designer Julie Elkiw ably dresses the four actors in variations on Gould’s classic ivy cap-overcoat-scarf ensemble.
The show is being performed in the Downstairs Hall of the Epcor Centre. How to get there? Enter at the Stage Door on 9th Avenue S.E. and follow the signs. Now, go. |
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