>>REVIEW
HEAVEN
Runs until November 18
Downstage Theatre and Rogues Theatre
Pumphouse Theatres
As CanStage’s artistic producer cautioned at the play’s premiere in 2000, there are certainly shades of anger to be found in George F. Walker’s Heaven. There is a satisfying anger in the protagonist’s distaste for the ethnic and religious hatred of the world. Unfortunately, after well over two hours, there is also the palpable anger of your ass in its seat, screaming for release from what has become a fire and brimstone tirade.
Forty-five minutes too long and well past any thoughtful ambiguity, Heaven’s script cannot be saved by its uneven co-production between the Downstage Performance Society and Rogues Theatre, fizzling brightly but prematurely well before the intermission, nearly an hour and a half in.
Staged minimally in the Joyce Doolittle Theatre with scattered plastic plants and trash, Heaven’s world is a microcosmic park that is both home and trap for its characters. Jimmy (Joe-Norman Shaw) is consumed by his contempt for the world’s hypocrisy, focusing first on the naysaying of his wife’s Jewish family and his own Catholic one and later on by his work as a human rights lawyer. Adding a layer of economic inequality, addicts Derek (Johnathan Ramcharan) and Sissy (Candace Bryant) muddle through, with Derek suffering under the heel of a disaffected cop named Karl (Rob Hay) who also holds a vicious grudge against Jimmy.
Fundamentally, Heaven is a white man’s view of racism, personified in the conflicted Jimmy whose struggle with his own prejudices starkly contrasts his work as a lawyer committed to assisting the disadvantaged. While his anger sounds at first like bigotry, it reveals itself to be a more general indictment of human weakness, the kind that causes disaffected minorities or even characters like Jimmy and Karl to lash out at each other. To a point, this acerbic nature makes Jimmy compelling, even funny. Drawn out to the play’s considerable length, however, this constant high pitch soon causes cracks to form in its façade, breaking long before its conclusion.
Though Shaw is able to demonstrate Jimmy’s arrogance and anger, his performance offers a lot of volume and precious little depth, still fumbling the odd line. Similarly, Hay’s Karl excels in his villainy, but lacks the depth to make the disenfranchised cop anything more than a one-note Iago. On the periphery, Ramcharan is unremarkable and Bryant’s performance in an already underwritten part is downright mechanical.
It is in Barb Mitchell as Jimmy’s wife, Judy, and Joel Cochrane as her rabbi, David, that the play has its strongest performances. While later scenes unhinge her from reality and remove the control that makes her so compelling, Mitchell is nonetheless a strong presence and a well-cast complement to the hyperbolic passion of Shaw. Cochrane, the artistic producer of Hit and Myth Theatre proving his acting chops, provides a cool rationalism, a delicate control that successfully renders David as a voice of reason unsure that he is being heard.
Time, it would seem, is not on director Simon Mallett’s side. After over two-and-a-half hours of pitched political rhetoric, anger has declined into defeat, and release seems more like heaven than the play’s ambiguous afterlife. |
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