>>PREVIEW
MURDER IN GREEN MEADOWS
Runs until February 18
Vertigo Mystery Theatre
The Playhouse (Tower Centre)
In a play about the artifice of affluence, it’s especially appropriate that Vertigo’s production of Murder in Green Meadows begins by awing its audience with the enviable appearance of wealth. Simply, Terry Gunvordahl’s set is a real estate wet dream – a tastefully appointed suburban home with a soaring roof and a central fireplace, detailed enough even to match the wood accents of Vertigo’s Playhouse Theatre. Thankfully, while appearances may be deceiving in playwright Douglas Post’s script, Vertigo’s production is every bit as well made as its setting.
Playing on the notion that manipulation and predatory greed are the pathological faces of the drive needed to succeed in business, Green Meadows imagines a pair of couples whose initial pleasantries devolve into the stock and trade of mystery theatre. Having just arrived in the play’s titular Green Meadows development, Thomas (Mark Jenkins) and Joan Deveraux (Kira Bradley) are greeted by Carolyn (Chantal Perron) and Jeffrey (Tyler Rive) Simons, and a friendship of convenience begins to develop between both pairs. But as inklings of the Deveraux’s portentous departure from their last home become apparent, and Thomas’s facade drops in the confines of their home, the appearances of neighbourly niceties drop in favour of lies, an affair and ultimately murder.
Gifted with a strong cast and a production whose technical skill matches both the play’s decadence and the depth of its dark turns, Green Meadows proves to be another success for director Kevin McKendrick, whose recent directorial turns in Far Away and Urinetown displayed his ability to mix the dark and comic. Realizing characters in a play meant to oscillate between light and sinister is no small challenge, but Green Meadows’ cast succeeds.
Consistent with the play’s theme of veneer versus reality, Jenkins’s baby-faced headshot in Vertigo’s lobby belies his wickedly sinister turn as an arch-manipulator and emotional abuser. The designer of the Green Meadows development, Jenkins’s Thomas exerts a similar, cold control on his wife that is hidden from all but his victim and the audience. A chilling bogeyman, Jenkins’s performance cuts to the heart of unchecked greed in a city still in the throes of its own success.
Whether by design or inclination, Rive himself seems to have made a fair trade in recent seasons in bombast, recently as Officer Lockstock in Ground Zero Theatre’s production of Urinetown, which McKendrick also directed. It suits the affable Jeffrey, matching both his initially jocular friendship with Thomas and his initial leeriness toward Joan’s advances.
Sharing the contrast between Jenkins’s menace and Rive’s joviality, Perron and Bradley play as essential opposites. Carolyn, played with agile wit by Perron, is a former professional driven to a quiet life as a housewife because of an early nervous breakdown. Joan, on the other hand, exhibits none of the independence of her would-be friend, submitting to her domineering husband instead. Explaining to Jeffrey that she once burned her doll collection because she felt able to make the transition into someone’s wife, Bradley’s Joan reveals that she is able to be little more than a plaything herself.
Like the doll’s house that Joan destroys, Gunvordahl’s set is an urban fantasy whose arresting lighting design lends an authenticity that sees day pass into night with the subtlety and richness of a property built to catch the light. Accented by the occasional spotlight and combined with sound designer Amir Amiri’s original soundscape, the growing menace of the Deveraux’s ostensibly comforting home is palpable. A contrast between beauty and beastly acts, Green Meadows is a play whose concern for the appearance of things is apparent.
The blackouts between scenes are invariably filled with the audience’s murmurs, revelling in the play’s latest twists, but like any good mystery play, the real thrill is in returning to the lit stage and the machinations of its characters. Even with blood on its floor or its lights dimmed, the house that Gunvordahl built is an inviting one. |
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