>>PREVIEW
THE DAZZLE
Runs until December 2
Sage Theatre
Pumphouse Theatre
Over the course of decades, collecting literally tons of what can only be described as junk, Homer and Langley Collyer turned their Harlem townhouse into a tomb where they lived until their bodies were discovered in 1947. The scale of their obsessive collecting was so epic that it took over two weeks to find both bodies.
The idea of two brothers whose insularity and possessiveness kept them in junk-coddled seclusion is a fascinating one that has piqued the interest of playwrights Mark St. Germain (The Collyer Brothers at Home) and Mark Saltzman (Clutter: The True Story of the Collyer Brothers Who Never Threw Anything Out). But in Richard Greenberg’s The Dazzle, the Collyers’ obsessive collection is less important than the codependent relationship that evolves between them, an insularity that owes more to the grey matter in their heads than the junk littering the home.
Where St. Germain and Saltzman created more broadly drawn comedy, Greenberg’s play has been described as a "drawing-room tragedy," a dense mixture of staccato drawing-room wordplay and the desperate relationship between two brothers caught in a decaying home. Though its conclusion in tragedy is inevitable, its language suggests playful, if increasingly insane repartee.
"There’s so much mental gymnastics, the thought process is so sensual and surreal, bouncing all over the place. It’s a great lesson in brain flexibility," says Frank Zotter, who plays Langley in Sage Theatre’s upcoming production of The Dazzle, of the play’s language.
"It’s always a curve ball, never a fast ball," adds Duval Lang, who plays Homer.
Though its story takes liberties with historical truth, adding a divisive female character named Milly (Chantal Peron) and even fudging the brothers’ respective vocations, there is an honesty to the emotional need between Homer and Langley. As Zotter points out, Greenberg drives his comedy from his characters, a focus that renders their codependency both comic and deeply tragic.
"I need him (Homer)," he says. "If I let him look in the mirror and he sees that too clearly he might leave me."
Already filled by the grey of set designer Terry Gunvordahl’s movable, junk-filled shelves, the Collyers’ world is made all the more claustrophobic by material thrown through the townhouse’s windows. Thematically, it is no coincidence that the real Collyer brothers lived through the ghettoizing of Harlem – both as self-styled hermits and white males in an increasingly black Harlem, they were an enclave increasingly terrified by the outside world.
"They’re being shunned by the neighbourhood, they’re outcasts, sticking out like sore thumbs and are being teased, persecuted. It’s a garrison mentality," says Lang. "Building up a barricade to keep the world away, except for the stuff."
"Not only does the outside world become alien, it becomes a threat," adds Zotter. "I get to the point when I’ve set up a pulley system for a trap, and in reality the real Langley died because of his booby traps. It’s a study of how you can magnify phobias to their umpteenth degree."
In reality, Homer starved to death when, dead by his own booby trap, Langley was unable to bring food to his older, now-blind brother. To the very end, the Collyer brothers depended wholly on one another, and that dependence ultimately consumed them both.
"You can’t live your life with only one person. Friends are important, lovers are important. You need to have people in your life, not (just) a (single) person, and these two only really had each other," says Zotter. "They played every role to each other. They weren’t lovers, but there was certainly that old couple dynamic.
"The love is deep, but it’s a needy love." |
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