The Dissemblers

By Jason Bryden. Directed by Amiel Gladstone. Produced by Touchstone Theatre and Playwrights Theatre Centre. At the Playwrights Theatre Centre Studio on Friday, May 2. Continues until May 10

Jason Bryden’s The Dissemblers is all about honesty. So here goes.

The heart of this new script makes little emotional sense to me. An artist named Dashel is preparing an installation: a leafless tree full of dead crows. Dash is in a relationship with Mi Mi, having an affair with Olivia, and trying to maintain a friendship with Simon. After a bout of cancer, Dash is trying to tell the truth. But none of this matters.

Mostly, Dash is a condescending twit, but he also makes sudden emotional demands. He tells Simon that Simon’s girlfriend, Jules, is a jackass, then begs his friend not to walk away from him. If Bryden had evoked Dash’s experience of cancer more fully, it might have explained these changes of mood. As it is, the cancer doesn’t feel real and the flips appear arbitrary.

And what’s at stake in any of these relationships? I have little idea why Dash wants to keep Simon in his life. Yes, habit and loyalty, but that’s vague. Mi Mi is even more relentlessly vicious and judgmental than Simon is. Olivia is more promising—her desire to move on with her life makes her relatively appealing. Still, that can’t save the scene in which Olivia rants at Dash for selling out his art. From what we’ve seen of it, that art is so banal there’s nothing to compromise.

Director Amiel Gladstone’s relentless pacing exacerbates the problem of the script’s superficiality.

As Dash, John Murphy looks ill at ease. Occasionally, he reaches for depth, but the script doesn’t support him. Medina Hahn plays Mi Mi with furious concentration, but that can’t turn the character into a human being.

The actors who listen more, and whose characters listen more, fare better. Sasa Brown finds softness in Olivia, Jennifer Mawhinney brings depth to the dippy Jules, and Michael Rinaldi is stellar as Simon.

It helps that Bryden has given Simon, who is a real-estate agent, specific and funny material. Referring to laminate, he says, “People go crazy for a woodlike finish.” That line wouldn’t work as well as it does if Rinaldi didn’t deliver with a deadpan that combines irony and honesty. Simon says absurd things; Rinaldi makes them matter.