>>PREVIEW
THY NEIGHBOUR’S WIFE
Runs until May 26
Urban Curvz Theatre
Joyce Doolittle Theatre (Pumphouse Theatres)
Balancing sexual power is a passionate exercise, especially when the only tool given to a woman stripped of personal freedom is that same passion. In 1915, Jennie Hawkes, a cuckolded wife restrained by antiquated mores of social propriety, murdered her husband’s lover and became the first woman in Alberta to be sentenced to hang. Now, with local female-centred company Urban Curvz set to produce a Calgary premiere of Tara Beagan’s Dora-winning Thy Neighbour’s Wife, that same passion will fuel an examination of power, sex and truth.
With its title an eponymous nod to the relationship between Jennie Hawkes’s (Jamie Konchak) husband, Wilfred (Len Harvey), and his neighbour’s wife, Rosella Stoley (Simone Saunders), Thy Neighbour’s Wife explores the sexual politics of the era through the explicit power games of Wilfred’s "indiscretions." Living side-by-side in houses linked by a doorway in the kitchen, the two are emboldened by the covert axis where the Hawkes’ servant and the play’s narrator, Aisling Corrigan (Beagan), does her best to keep her work satisfactory and her presence unobtrusive. Appropriately, the play’s creation began in much the same spirit of reclusive observation.
As an usher in Toronto’s Mirvish theatres, Beagan jotted much of the play’s first draft on the backs of Lion King program inserts that explained who would be replacing Pumba or Timone in a given performance. Six months later, she had secured a production for her first full-length play with UnSpun Theatre, going on to win a pair of Dora Mavor Moore Awards.
"Two-hundred and seventy-nine people saw it," says Beagan. "No one really noticed it except the Dora jurors."
Approaching the play as a still-inexperienced playwright, Beagan has, or at least will have played, Aisling in both Thy Neighbour’s Wife’s original and Calgary productions. It’s a process, she says, that has allowed her to continue to understand the script more completely as she makes her way inevitably to the mythic final draft.
"Last year, I had an offer to publish, but I knew that meant it would be in paper and there was no turning back after that," says Beagan. "And then this great opportunity came up and I was like, ‘Great, so I can finally understand what the final draft is.’"
One of the play’s persistent themes revolves around the First World War. While the war’s distant reality is a daily constant for the woman of Beagan’s play, it is not, per se, a story about war. Rather, with the country’s population of young men abroad, making Wilfred’s infidelities even simpler, the war is a catalyst both for the play’s central murder and for the eventual outcry that commuted Jennie Hawkes’s sentence from hanging to 10 years imprisonment.
"I think the groundswell movement that took place with the women who worked to commute her sentence was only possible because it was during the war, because there was such an absence of men," explains Beagan. "They couldn’t be ignored because they were the majority."
It was this sudden voice, and the contradiction of Hawkes’s own silencing, that ultimately drew Beagan to the story of her life and conviction. Though Beagan’s interest was not initially piqued, she gravitated to a story whose basic tragedy was that, in Hawkes’s courtroom appearance, she wasn’t allowed to explain herself based on her sex. Jennie Hawkes, she saw, was a woman whose voice had been stolen.
As an actor playing a woman locked in contradictory sexual politics, reviled on one side as murderer and empathized by another, Konchak’s role as Jennie Hawkes recalls her performance in last season’s University of Calgary production of Oleanna as Carol, a female student who accuses her professor of sexual harassment. But while David Mamet’s two-hander is often known as a tale of subjective gender politics, Konchak sees a great deal more ambiguity in Jennie, a woman whose period granted far less freedom than Mamet’s female student.
"First of all, I’d like to hope there’s more balance to the stories and characters (in Thy Neighbor’s Wife)," she says. "I feel with Oleanna, one of the major struggles is that it’s written as very one-sided, there isn’t a lot of weight in her (Carol’s) argument. You have to work very hard to get people to sympathize with her."
"You can’t go wrong/right," she adds of Thy Neighbor’s Wife. "I guess you can choose on your own who’s wrong and right. We’ll give you a lot of information, look at a lot of different stories, and you get to weigh and decide."
Unlike the straight, linear narrative of Mamet’s play, Thy Neighbor’s Wife places significant emphasis on the narration of Aisling, whose recollections weave together events related more by their telling natures than their actual proximity. While Wilfred fights with Jennie, for example, Rosella administers fellatio, only to storm away when the tone of the one conversation intrudes into the other. It’s a style that spins around the axis of its theme, offering a perspective created by tiny pieces of a single story.
At its core, just as its name suggests, Thy Neighbor’s Wife is a play driven by the contradictory passion and contractual obligation built into the structure of Edwardian-era marriage. Irrespective of class, any freedom granted to a woman was, essentially, perishable, which was a frustration that finds its literal fulfilment in the perishing of one broken woman and the ostracizing of Jennie Hawkes. Even in this reality, however, both Konchak and Beagan hope to find a portrayal that refuses to vilify even the man responsible at least for the motive behind Jennie Hawkes’s crime. In the balancing act of sexual politics, there will always remain, after all, two sides.
"You have a standpoint, a personal political reason, but at the same time you don’t want to make a villain out of Wilfred," explains Konchak.
"Because you don’t want to alienate half the audience," adds Beagan. |
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