>>REVIEW
FAR AWAY
Runs until April 8
Theatre Junction (The Grand Theatre)
One of the most important lessons any theatergoer can learn is that it is completely acceptable to walk out of a performance shaking your head and admitting, "I don’t understand."
Not all performances are perfect, nor is every play meant to be understood in traditional ways. Context, for example, is often essential.
Theatre Junction’s production of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away represents a great deal, both in terms of the play itself and in its meaning in the larger context of Theatre Junction’s artistic direction. Written before 9/11, the play is considered a challenging, prescient examination of a culture of fear and hatred, demonstrating, in the apocryphal words usually attributed to Benjamin Franklin: "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." Theatre Junction’s decision to stage it, therefore, speaks volumes to the direction in which they hope to take their future productions.
Divided neatly into three acts, representing three stages in the life of Joan (Adrienne Smook), the play’s female protagonist, Far Away moves rapidly from the quietude of a secluded rural house toward satirical absurdity, sometimes genuinely funny in a hyperbolic world where natural forces can literally ally against the human race, sometimes so disturbingly surreal that the visual effect is unforgettable. In an environment where fear has driven us toward the most literal conceivable form of "total war," the play’s message, while clear, is wrapped in an absurdist motif so heavy that audiences can be forgiven for walking out of the theatre confused.
On one level, the play’s abstracted surrealism plays perfectly into the mandate of both the play’s broad social message and Theatre Junction’s more immediate space. With so much left unsaid, so many arresting images produced in a scant 50 minutes, the play necessarily provokes discussion, for which The Grand furnishes the swanky Velvet Lounge. Far Away is not a play to be consumed whole, but slowly digested in conversation.
On another level, however, the play’s loose narrative structure and frequent fadeouts often serve to confuse its own subject with rather less style than it deserves. Where Churchill succeeds with chilling deadpan lines like "If it was a party, why was there so much blood?" her transitions are so abrupt and stark that the play’s characters are often rendered unrecognizable. Where one heightens the palpable sensation of dread, the other is simply dense.
In the hands of Theatre Junction, the uncanny effect of Churchill’s surreal world showcases not only the company’s artistic strength, but the logistical flexibility of their new home as well. Seated in the round, the audience is faced by the towering image of designer Terry Gunvordahl’s backdrop, spindly branches and a brilliant full moon. Largely confining his action behind the explicit demarcation of a short wooden divider, director Kevin McKendrick is able to keep the production’s staging dynamic, effectively breaking its barriers both figuratively and literally. And the play’s "parade" sequence, which owes a great deal of its macabre fascination to costume designer Deneen McArthur, is the most visually arresting and uncomfortable spectacle I have seen in years.
Theatre Junction’s strong crew is complemented by a cast that plays Churchill’s work with all the paradoxical absurdity and deadpan seriousness it deserves. Smook and Duncan Ollerenshaw play the growing workplace relationship between Joan and Todd with an appropriately self-involved blindness to a world of horrors, while Karen Johnson-Diamond’s performance as the maternal Harper is a chilling portrait of a woman whose convictions are absolute, even if their basis is malleable. The cast’s only weakness is in its youngest member, Franca Haesler as young Joan, whose laudable attention to her enunciation is not enough to save her substantial performance time from an awkward, flat delivery.
But while the collective result may be shocking, striking and resonant, Far Away remains a play so skeletal in plot, so visually arresting and dissonant, that it might be best understood as a scripted piece of performance art designed more to provoke than to answer. It is a challenging piece, simply put, because it asks questions that do not offer simple answers.
Theatergoers are often left asking questions – they can do worse than doing so in The Grand’s lobby. |
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