Melancholy Play: why do people change?
Toronto: Taking audiences on an engaging yet bizarre journey, The Melancholy Play, produced by project undertow as part of the ongoing SummerWorks Festival, demands that viewers be willing to accept an absurdist, stylized approach. Sarah Ruhl's script offers a tale of deep transformation and its effect on others. With its outlandish, stranger-than-life characters, it must be what a Christopher Durang play is like.
Our heroine Tillie (Ingrid Rae Doucet) is sad, very sad... the bank where she works has sent her to a psychiatrist to work out her issues. In talking to Lorenzo (Salvatore Antonio), the psychiatrist, she manages to make him fall in love with her melancholic beauty. Then others fall for her – first Frank (a lonely tailor, played by Ennis Esmer), then Frances (an unfulfilled hairdresser, played by Pamela Rhae Ferguson) and Joan (a nurse, played by Anna Hardwick, who just happens to be Frances' lover). Each is drawn to Tilly's strange beauty, wishing to help her through her melancholy so that she becomes happy and “normal” (and played by Melissa-Jane Shaw).
Melancholy Play is a story of what can happen when people change – it reminded me how uncomfortable we are with people who evolve into a new ways of living. Most people in our lives occupy a certain role that we have assigned to them... but as they grow and change, they may break out of that role and we need to learn how to deal with that reality.
Project undertow has created a very polished production in Melancholy Play. The acting is uniformly strong with amazing cello accompaniment onstage by Cheryl Ockrant. Each performer commits to telling us this strange fantastic story. I was deeply drawn into the lives of these characters and wanted to know what would happen to them... I mean, what do you do when there is an epidemic of people becoming almonds anyway?
Credits: Melancholy Play produced by Project Undertow; written by Sarah Ruhl; direction by Rosa Laborde, set & costumes Patrick DuWors, lighting Trevor Schwellnus, original music and cello Cheryl Ockrant, acting by Ennis Esmer, Ingride Rae Doucet, Salvatore Antonio, Pamela Rhae Ferguson, Anna Hardwick, Melissa-Jane Shaw and Cheryl Ockrant.