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| The company of Forgiveness. (Photo: David House.) |
Stratford’s production of Forgiveness (at the Tom Patterson Theatre), Hiro Kanagawa’s adaptation of Mark Sakamoto’s book Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents, marks the Canadian play’s eastern premiere. (It has been staged in Vancouver and Calgary.) The play’s dual protagonists are Mitsue Sakamoto (played by Yoshie Bancroft), and Ralph MacLean (Jeff Lillico), whose lives were shaped irrevocably by their World War II experiences. Ralph grew up on the Magdalen Islands in Quebec and lied about his age to get away from his abusive alcoholic father and join the first Canadian unit stationed in Japan, before Canada and the U.S. declared war in the wake of Pearl Harbor. He was captured and spent four years in a Japanese POW camp. Mitsue and her Japanese family were deprived of their citizenship rights and forced to leave their home in British Columbia in 1942, first for an internment camp and then to harvest sugar beets on a farm in the Prairies, laboring long hours for a pittance; their initial “home” was a converted chicken coop. The ban wasn’t lifted until four years after the end of the war. What links these two stories together is the romance that flared up in Calgary, where the two main characters wound up, between Mitsue’s son Stan (Leon Quin at the performance I attended, standing in for Douglas Oyama) and Ralph’s daughter Diane (Allison Lynch). The author, Sakamoto, is their shared grandson.
This is a remarkable and certainly an unpredictable story, and the Stratford mounting, directed by Stafford Arima with a cast of twenty actors, half of them Asian and all but three of them cast in multiple roles, is first-rate. The staging is cinematic, especially in the first act; Lorenzo Savoini designed the compact set (as well as the costumes) and Sammy Chien’s projections include vivid illustrations and animation by Cindy Mochizuki in the anime style. There are no dead spots in the acting. Bancroft is outstanding – her performance is not just deeply felt but also fueled by a vivacity that calls to mind the expressiveness of silent film actresses like Mae Marsh and Janet Gaynor. Lillico, an actor I first admired when he played the reporter, Skeets Miller, in Floyd Collins at the Shaw in 2004, applies a poetic simplicity and unshakeable authenticity to the role of Ralph, a retiring, sensitive boy who, still a teenager, has to figure out a way to navigate the hell he tumbles into – and to tolerate the intrusions of the ghosts of comrades whose deaths he was unable to prevent. Both Lillico and Bancroft handle long and complex roles that comprehend challenging arcs of time and growth: we meet them when they’re high schoolers and by the end of the narrative they have become grandparents.
Under Arima’s grounded direction the supporting cast renders their various parts so distinctively that one feels the company is even larger than it is. Among the characterizations that stuck with me are those of June Fukumura as the sympathetic dress shop owner Mitsue works for when it becomes clear, even before the war, that a young Japanese woman cherishing a dream to teach English will never being able to pursue that career; and Steven Hao, who plays all three suitors Mitsue turns down for her employer’s nephew, Hideo, who is so mesmerized by Mitsue that he can’t help peering at her through the shop window. These are lyrical glimpses into characters in the corners of the story who have been fleshed out by the actors. Fukumura also brings sweetness and humor to the too-brief role of Miyoko, Mitsue’s bosom friend, whom she loses to tuberculosis early in the story. Hao has an affable larger-than-life quality when he takes on the part of Stan’s older brother Ron, a rock promoter who, around the time Stan is dating Diane, has begun to handle The Guess Who. On a larger scale are the performances of Michael Man as Hideo and Manami Hara as Tomi, Mitsue’s mother; both are superb. The playwright himself plays Kato, the terrifying, whiskey-soaked commandant of the POW camp (as well as Mitsue’s father, Yosuke), but the night I saw the play John Ng took over for him, memorably.
Two of my favorite elements in the writing of Forgiveness are the immensity of sharply etched narrative detail and the intercutting of the time periods, so that we follow the lead-up to Ralph and Mitsue’s wartime stories while we see the challenges Stan has to meet to bring the two families, his own and Diane’s, together. Both these virtues, unfortunately, effectively vanish in act two, almost all of which is set during the war. The second act is brutal – especially, of course, in the POW camp sequences, but also in the depiction of the lives Mitsue and Hideo and their families lead when Japanese Canadians like them become scapegoats. We get almost a full hour of their struggles, and there’s so little tonal variety that a viewer can feel battered. The Shaw production is impeccable, but the play itself is more successful in its first half.
Tons of Money (at the Royal George) is one of the Shaw season’s more obscure items, a 1922 English farce by Will Evans and Valentine (the pen name of Archibald Thomas Pechey) that was a hit in its time and generated three feature films – a 1924 silent, an early talkie (1930) with three of the stars of the West End production, and a 1934 French adaptation called J’ai une idée! Its deliriously convoluted plot revolves around an inheritance. An inventor named Aubrey Allington (Mike Nadajewski), who hasn’t let his inability to make money stand in the way of living comfortably in the country with his wife Louise (Julia Course), discovers on the same day that he’s on the verge of bankruptcy and that he’s inherited a fortune from his uncle. The second in line for the money is a cousin believed to have died violently in Mexico. At first the couple is overjoyed at the legacy, but they quickly realize that they owe so much to creditors that when their debts are cleared there won’t be much left. So Louise comes up with a plan: Aubrey will pretend to be blown up in an explosion in his laboratory – the manner of his death taking care of the problem of an inconvenient corpse – and then return, disguised, as his own rediscovered cousin. Things go awry, naturally, and by the second act there are three men on the scene claiming to be Cousin George.
The play comes from an era in English theatre when farce reigned supreme. Farce is a notoriously tricky genre: it needs to be played very fast – not so fast that we miss the bons mots (Evans and Valentine have contributed some nifty ones) but quick enough that we don’t linger over the silly plot. And everyone on stage has to render the style with gleaming precision. The director of Tons of Money, Eda Holmes, did a lovely job with Shaw’s The Apple Cart two seasons ago, and I haven’t forgotten her production of Floyd Collins back in 2004, which was one of the shows that made me into a devotee of the Shaw Festival. But she doesn’t seem to be comfortable with farce. Tons of Money is erratic – sometimes hilarious, sometimes clunky – and not everyone on stage is up to the challenge. Course, who floated through a marvelous – and decidedly farcical – revival of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit in 2023, is, unsurprisingly, in clear command of the material; Nehassaiu deGannes combines elegance and a touch of looniness as Louise’s half-deaf aunt; and Ron Kennell, in the small role of the Allington’s oddball gardener, gets a laugh every time he shows up. Nadajewski is occasionally hilarious but often over the top, and the rest of the cast doesn’t quite get the tone right. I was sorry not to see Graeme Somerville in the role of the butler, Sprules, who has his own plans for the inheritance, and Marla McLean as Simpson, the maid and Sprules’s lover and co-conspirator; both were out the night I saw the show. It should be noted, though, that Travis Seetoo, who stood in for Somerville, handled the assignment with considerable skill.
Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt is a Romantic saga, originally produced in 1867, three years before he switched to realism and ushered in the great age of theatrical modernism with A Doll’s House. No one is likely to revive it now, not just because it’s five hours long and has a huge cast of characters but also because its treatment of the two major women characters, Peer’s mother, Ase, and his beloved, Solveig, as long-suffering victims of his neglect and selfishness who nonetheless sacrifice themselves for him out of love (in Ibsen’s narrative, Solveig’s love saves his soul from oblivion), would probably enrage contemporary audiences. Pity – it’s a magnificent work of dramatic poetry. This season Shaw has staged the Canadian premiere of the American playwright Will Eno’s absurdist take on Peer Gynt, Gnit (in the Jackie Maxwell Studio}. Eno has won an Obie and two Drama Desk Awards and has been a finalist for a Pulitzer, but I found both of his plays with which I was already familiar, Middletown (his best known and most enthusiastically received work), and The Realistic Joneses, perversely undramatic and so unfocused that ultimately they didn’t seem to be about anything at all. Still, I cherished some hope that, with one of the geniuses of dramatic structure as his model, Eno might land on firmer ground.
He hasn’t; in fact, Gnit is actually worse. Under the direction of the Shaw’s artistic director, Tim Carroll, Qasim Khan plays Eno’s version of Peer, called Peter Gnit, and five other actors fill in a variety of other roles. The story is more or less Ibsen’s, though I can’t imagine what anyone who doesn’t know the original would make of the fragments scattered throughout Eno’s version, especially since his scenes are indecipherable and his dialogue is babble presented as if it were devilishly clever. Here are a few examples: “Somebody has to die from all the dead people inside me,” “God, is it daytime or is morning starting to look sadder?.” “You remind me of someone; I don’t care who,” “What part of every word I said don’t you understand?,” “Birds sing – I thought of that the other day and nearly fell over,” “That’s life; the rest is just paper clips and celebrity gossip.” Eno’s one textual trick is having his characters make claims and then erase immediately erase them, as in “OK, it’s pretty simple but it’s really confusing” or “Have you learned anything since we last met, or did we ever meet?” or – my personal favorite:
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| Mike Nadajewski and Julia Course in Tons of Money. (Photo: David Cooper.) |
Tons of Money (at the Royal George) is one of the Shaw season’s more obscure items, a 1922 English farce by Will Evans and Valentine (the pen name of Archibald Thomas Pechey) that was a hit in its time and generated three feature films – a 1924 silent, an early talkie (1930) with three of the stars of the West End production, and a 1934 French adaptation called J’ai une idée! Its deliriously convoluted plot revolves around an inheritance. An inventor named Aubrey Allington (Mike Nadajewski), who hasn’t let his inability to make money stand in the way of living comfortably in the country with his wife Louise (Julia Course), discovers on the same day that he’s on the verge of bankruptcy and that he’s inherited a fortune from his uncle. The second in line for the money is a cousin believed to have died violently in Mexico. At first the couple is overjoyed at the legacy, but they quickly realize that they owe so much to creditors that when their debts are cleared there won’t be much left. So Louise comes up with a plan: Aubrey will pretend to be blown up in an explosion in his laboratory – the manner of his death taking care of the problem of an inconvenient corpse – and then return, disguised, as his own rediscovered cousin. Things go awry, naturally, and by the second act there are three men on the scene claiming to be Cousin George.
The play comes from an era in English theatre when farce reigned supreme. Farce is a notoriously tricky genre: it needs to be played very fast – not so fast that we miss the bons mots (Evans and Valentine have contributed some nifty ones) but quick enough that we don’t linger over the silly plot. And everyone on stage has to render the style with gleaming precision. The director of Tons of Money, Eda Holmes, did a lovely job with Shaw’s The Apple Cart two seasons ago, and I haven’t forgotten her production of Floyd Collins back in 2004, which was one of the shows that made me into a devotee of the Shaw Festival. But she doesn’t seem to be comfortable with farce. Tons of Money is erratic – sometimes hilarious, sometimes clunky – and not everyone on stage is up to the challenge. Course, who floated through a marvelous – and decidedly farcical – revival of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit in 2023, is, unsurprisingly, in clear command of the material; Nehassaiu deGannes combines elegance and a touch of looniness as Louise’s half-deaf aunt; and Ron Kennell, in the small role of the Allington’s oddball gardener, gets a laugh every time he shows up. Nadajewski is occasionally hilarious but often over the top, and the rest of the cast doesn’t quite get the tone right. I was sorry not to see Graeme Somerville in the role of the butler, Sprules, who has his own plans for the inheritance, and Marla McLean as Simpson, the maid and Sprules’s lover and co-conspirator; both were out the night I saw the show. It should be noted, though, that Travis Seetoo, who stood in for Somerville, handled the assignment with considerable skill.
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| Gabriella Sundar Singh and Qasim Khan in Gnit. (Photo: Michael Cooper.) |
Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt is a Romantic saga, originally produced in 1867, three years before he switched to realism and ushered in the great age of theatrical modernism with A Doll’s House. No one is likely to revive it now, not just because it’s five hours long and has a huge cast of characters but also because its treatment of the two major women characters, Peer’s mother, Ase, and his beloved, Solveig, as long-suffering victims of his neglect and selfishness who nonetheless sacrifice themselves for him out of love (in Ibsen’s narrative, Solveig’s love saves his soul from oblivion), would probably enrage contemporary audiences. Pity – it’s a magnificent work of dramatic poetry. This season Shaw has staged the Canadian premiere of the American playwright Will Eno’s absurdist take on Peer Gynt, Gnit (in the Jackie Maxwell Studio}. Eno has won an Obie and two Drama Desk Awards and has been a finalist for a Pulitzer, but I found both of his plays with which I was already familiar, Middletown (his best known and most enthusiastically received work), and The Realistic Joneses, perversely undramatic and so unfocused that ultimately they didn’t seem to be about anything at all. Still, I cherished some hope that, with one of the geniuses of dramatic structure as his model, Eno might land on firmer ground.
He hasn’t; in fact, Gnit is actually worse. Under the direction of the Shaw’s artistic director, Tim Carroll, Qasim Khan plays Eno’s version of Peer, called Peter Gnit, and five other actors fill in a variety of other roles. The story is more or less Ibsen’s, though I can’t imagine what anyone who doesn’t know the original would make of the fragments scattered throughout Eno’s version, especially since his scenes are indecipherable and his dialogue is babble presented as if it were devilishly clever. Here are a few examples: “Somebody has to die from all the dead people inside me,” “God, is it daytime or is morning starting to look sadder?.” “You remind me of someone; I don’t care who,” “What part of every word I said don’t you understand?,” “Birds sing – I thought of that the other day and nearly fell over,” “That’s life; the rest is just paper clips and celebrity gossip.” Eno’s one textual trick is having his characters make claims and then erase immediately erase them, as in “OK, it’s pretty simple but it’s really confusing” or “Have you learned anything since we last met, or did we ever meet?” or – my personal favorite:
Everything’s going to be fine. Sorry – did I just say “everything” and did I just say “fine”? I meant two different words.
The actors – the other five are Course, deGannes, Nadajewski, Patrick Galligan and Gabriella Sundar Singh – approach this nonsense in the spirit of gamesmanship, but only Galligan survives the experiment. He really is a master actor: he manages to make Eno’s lines sound as if they contained some magical spark. Gnit isn’t the worst play ever written, but while you’re sitting through it, it sure feels like it is.
– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.
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