Wide Awake Hearts is full of dry abstractions
By Brendan Gall. Directed by Brian Cochrane. Presented by Twenty Something Theatre and Hardline Productions. At Little Moutain Gallery on Friday, December 5. Continues until December 20
There’s no juice; Brendan Gall’s Wide Awake Hearts is so full of dry abstractions that watching it feels like eating paper.
Instead of names, Gall identifies his characters using letters of the alphabet. A, a producer and writer of indie films, has seen to it that his wife, B, is cast in his latest movie. A has also insisted that his old friend, C, be cast as B’s lover. A is convinced that B and C have the hots for one another in real life, and, apparently, he thinks that putting his project and his financial future at risk is the perfect way to smoke them out.
This is nuts, of course, and I spent a lot of time in the first half of the play asking myself why A was so bent on self-destruction. The question was so insistent that I finally took a mental time-out to work on it. Wide Awake Hearts is concerned with reality and illusion in general—watching it, we don’t always know when we’re in a scene from the movie and when we’re in a scene from the framing story. But the play is primarily concerned with the reality and illusion of love. The characters, who are all in their late 20s more or less, are struggling with the realization that the intense intimacy that romantic love produces is short-lived. A is furious about this and would rather destroy his world than grow up and negotiate solitude within his marriage.
This makes sense to me, but I had to work it out abstractly; visceral and emotional connection to the characters might have helped me to understand A’s compulsion—and the rest of the story—more readily, but the play offered me neither.
Sometimes, the script’s comedy is similarly hollow. Gall’s dialogue includes many genuinely funny exchanges. When B and C are making out, for instance, he asks, “What do you like about me?” and she replies, “Your proximity.” But, sometimes, the riffs deliver all of the rhythm of a good joke but none of the humour, as in this back-and-forth: “Least I’m not smoking.” “What do you want, a ribbon?” “I dunno, can you smoke ribbons?”
Not surprisingly, the actors struggle with this material. Sean Harris Oliver delivers the lines in which A tells us that he might be going through a breakdown, but I rarely glimpsed any depth of exposure in Oliver’s performance. Gall makes B smart, but her main job is to be the kind of mysterious sex goddess that some straight guys are fond of writing. Genevieve Fleming delivers on the intelligence count but her performance is too contained to allow her to embody the magnetism the script requires of her. Claire Hesselgrave plays D, the film’s editor, who just happens to be C’s girlfriend. Hesselgrave knows about comic delivery: here, she makes the simple lines, “I don’t like to drink alone. I’ll do it, but I don’t like it”, unaccountably funny. But she attacks her performance with such fury from her first entrance that she leaves herself nowhere to go, and makes the character pretty much impenetrable.
Unsurprisingly, Robert Salvador (C) fares the best. Salvador has become Vancouver theatre’s answer to the Trivago guy: rumpled and sexy. And he has a remarkable ability to make every line ring with the spontaneity of a fresh discovery.
Jay Clift did the sound design and, in the opening scene, the jazz piano is so distracting that I wanted to search out the controls and turn it off. Sabrina Evertt's lighting, which includes the use of spooky footlights, is more effective.
Gall is a talented writer. In lots of ways, he gets the bones right in Wide Awake Hearts—the transitions, the rhythms, the big ideas. But the script needs some hot, steamy organs.
Comments