Preview
THE MERCY SEAT
Ground Zero Theatre
Starring Karen Johnson-Diamond and Chad Nobert
Written by Neil LaBute
Directed by Glenda Stirling
Runs April 20 to 30
Pumphouse Theatres
Director Glenda Stirling used to loathe Neil LaBute just on principle. She’s probably in good company, given that most people have, at some point, had a strong reaction to his work, and that reaction often translates as either love or loathing. Whether your introduction was cinematic (In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbours) or theatrical (Bash, The Shape of Things), chances are LaBute left an impression… right after he sucker-punched you.
However, Stirling has lately become quite caught up in LaBute’s harsh take on relationships as she directs his play The Mercy Seat, the final show in Ground Zero Theatre’s season. Unlike most LaBute plays, this one is set in a specific place, on a specific day – New York City, September 12, 2001. Ben Harcourt is with his mistress, Abby Prescott, trying to decide whether or not to wipe the slate clean and start again – which actually means deciding whether or not to tell his wife and kids that he is still alive in the aftermath of 9-11. The Mercy Seat is gritty, astute, severe, fast and funny, and LaBute immediately brings to the surface several questions surrounding opportunity.
"I’ve always known he was a good writer," admits Stirling, "but I think he’s become better at the nuances of truth as opposed to the battering ram of truth." That observation is felt in the play’s simple approach to the complexity it explores – one setting, two characters and an infinite number of words.
While the play’s backdrop is explicit, Stirling insists it is not about 9-11, but rather serves as a prism for it. "It’s a relationship that’s disintegrating in miniature and so, in this condensed hour and 20 minutes of time, we see all the tiny little details and threads come apart, not necessarily because of the pressures of 9-11, but because of the situation of that – what that makes possible and impossible."
Stirling, who usually likes to sit with a play for about six months, received the offer to direct this one close to the start of rehearsals and wondered whether or not to take it on. "Then a friend of mine said, ‘It’s about the disintegration of a relationship – you’re over 30, your entire life has been research.’"
What’s so fascinating about this play, says Stirling, "is that even in the midst of the morning after 9-11, even in the middle of the whole world falling to pieces, as we’re reeling from that insanity, we can still treat each other in a completely insane and cruel manner. Even when the evidence of that on a global scale is literally all around us, we still need to throw bombs into each other’s emotional lives and watch them blow up."
Does Stirling think that, because it’s set at such a specific point in history, The Mercy Seat could lose impact over time? Not in this case, she says. "Some events are so enormous in the scale of who we are as a civilization that we understand what they are." While it’s difficult to decide what events will have that kind of enduring impact, she admits, 9-11 is probably a safe bet.
Stirling has already given audiences a taste of her exceptional, motivated directing style on such contemporary work as the poetic horror Get Away by Greg MacArthur, seen at this year’s playRites festival, and Rebecca Gilman’s unassuming heartbreaker Blue Surge, also produced by Ground Zero.
"I’ve been really freakin’ lucky in the last couple of years with being offered projects that somehow suit where I am as a human being and a director. And having the opportunity to do that with fairly extraordinary artists," she adds with a smile. "And then it feels easy."
As one might gather from her work on Blue Surge, Stirling has a penchant for emotional rawness, and she describes The Mercy Seat as possessing that tension between repressing and expressing emotion onstage.
"This piece makes me think of Coward," she says, anticipating a reaction. "And saying Neil LaBute and Noël Coward in the same sentence would seem ostensibly like an oxymoron, but there is something (similar in their writing) about people trying to skate on top of the surface of horrific emotion, and at the same time, managing to throw these little poison bombs at one another, and trying to maintain this incredibly fast-paced, witty dialogue while cutting each other to bits."
And, like many of Coward’s plays, The Mercy Seat is essentially about relationships. "And one of two things happens in relationships," says Stirling. "You stay together forever or you break up…. Ultimately, it’s just about a couple trying, moment by moment, to uncover what they want from each other." |
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