>>REVIEW
ROSE
Runs until May 12
Broad Minds Productions
Joyce Doolittle Theatre (Pumphouse Theatres)
The one-person show is a formula of enviable economic simplicity. With one actor bringing as many characters and locations to life as the script calls for, the production cost of actors and designers is neatly subtracted, leaving a single, elegant integer: one. The challenge, then, is keeping the value high by injecting an entire world into that solitary actor.
Many plays solve the problem by channelling a frantic, passionate slate of characters through their lone actors – something like speed dating and demonic possession combined. Even in the absence of other actors, a production with this kind of energy wants for neither action nor company. However, in Broad Minds’s final show of the season, Martin Sherman’s Rose, the female-centred company has tackled a play whose elderly, titular protagonist doesn’t have the luxury of sweat-inducing mania or a myriad of characters. Instead, Sherman weaves a story that spans 80 years without ever allowing his leading lady to rise from her seat.
An elderly, still vibrant woman, Rose (Gayl Veinotte) is sitting shiva, a Jewish ritual of mourning that is at least as much about recollection as grief. Though she is ostensibly mourning for a slain child, her recollection is really of her own life, a series of social and geographic journeys beginning in her small village in Russia before the First World War and concluding in her home in Miami Beach. A compilation of collected anecdotes from Sherman’s own Jewish family and from historical records, Rose’s story is an often tragic one leavened by humour borne out of a lifetime of hardships. And while the play’s final moments bend the narrative arc toward an expressly political message, it is the endearing emotional truth of the play that ultimately makes it so compelling.
Sitting on a wooden bench with a water glass and a mini-fridge off to the side, Rose’s shiva is a sparsely appointed vigil, made even more so by the play’s extended monologue structure. The entire production, its history, characters and intensity, rest firmly on Rose’s shoulders, or at least her voice. It evokes images even more vivid than lighting designer RJ Conn’s projections, themselves drawn from historical archives. While Conn’s shifting lighting design helps to divide the myriad chapters of Rose’s life, the symbolic connections between the various kinds of light used are never clarified.
Further rounding out the play’s minimalist world is Jevon Hills’s soundscape, a smoothly integrated collection of traditional music that includes an ample helping of klezmer. The unity of the soundscape is only broken in the play’s introduction and conclusion as Elton John rears his tinkling sunglasses to nudge the mood into uncharacteristic sentimentality. Perhaps Sir Elton’s contribution is a nod to the backdrop’s puzzling, oversized rose petals, whose only function seems to be marking the play’s beginning and end as a cascade of lit objects.
It is Veinotte’s performance, then, coupled with Sherman’s powerful words, that carry the production through. Thankfully, under the direction of Maria Kliavkoff, Veinotte finds moments of profound and intense catharsis. Though at times rushing her delivery and sacrificing naturalism for a clumsy cough, Veinotte is up to the considerable task of Sherman’s organic storytelling, which is what ultimately makes Rose such an engaging production.
Navigating a lifetime with the well-edited precision of a Hollywood biopic, Rose’s story is a fine balance of sentimentality, honesty and the bald-faced lies that make a lifetime of pain bearable. As a final production for the season, Rose is an excellent choice for Broad Minds. Heart-rending, sweet and at times unapologetically political, Rose is a one-woman show whose words fill its stage with a skill that would shame even the most behemoth of casts. |
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