Review: “Coma Unplugged” at GCTC
By Stephen Brockwell
Photo by Steve Boyton
Thursday evening, November 27th, the GCTC presented the English world premiere of Coma Unplugged, Pierre-Michel Tremblay’s award winning one act play first presented at Théatre de la Manufacture in Montréal. It is a play about differences of class, culture and the male experience of lightning-speed cultural change. In the face of this change, Daniel, a well-regarded newspaper humorist has lost his sense of humour and, perhaps, his will to live.
Marjorie, the wife Daniel still loves has left him because he has lost his “spontaneity” and become a cynic; Daniel is bereft of the daughter he adores until Marjorie feels that Daniel is ready receive her at his condominium – a chaotic space composed of a collection of grey boxes that define the stage. The lack of colour and the chaotic rectangularity of the space is a straightforward representation of Daniel’s emptiness, and his need in middle age to compartmentalize his achievements, his emotions and his relationships. It is a purposefully ambiguous space that appears to be a real dwelling but is slowly revealed to be the psychological space of Daniels’s coma. In this nearly empty single room, as he prepares to give a speech on humour at university, Daniel encounters a childhood friend, his separated wife, a warrior he offended in one of his columns, and his breezy down-to-earth mother. Jeff Meadows plays Daniel’s friend Roger with exhilarating energy – he is the stereotype of the sports-loving, womanizing, beer-swilling “guys guy” who urges Daniel to come out with the boys, and to embrace his cult of “Hisculean” masculinity and testosterone.
Equally important, Daniel suffers the absence of two key people, speaking only on the phone to his daughter, and communicating exclusively by voice-mail with his best friend. Daniel’s best friend is a world-traveling fellow journalist who shares Daniel’s desire to be a renovated man in a changing world. Daniel’s daughter is the joy of his life, his greatest loss and they key to the poetic and enchanting resolution of the play.
Micheline Chevrier’s translation is exceptional – it preserves the differences of class, gender and generations at the heart of the play and, thankfully, re-interprets many of the jeux-de-mots in the very different idiomatic landscape of English. Daniel’s mother makes an almost too brief entrance in the second half of the play; the text Mary Ellis works from, and the energy with which she embraces it, say much about Madeleine’s place in the slower and simpler time of Daniel’s childhood.
The stage direction was superb – the movement and transitions within the small space appeared effortless, but each was choreographed to position Daniel in the middle of events as he is in the middle of his life – torn between the ease of disappearing into a disenchanted, unremarkable life and the challenge of asserting himself as a compassionate individual who has the strength of Wang Weilin, the man who stopped a tank in Tienamen Square by merely standing his ground. Daniel’s love of his daughter gives him the strength to stand his ground, to have compassion for himself and to grasp the final metaphor of the moon that brilliantly reinforces the timeless catharsis of genuine humour in the face of tragedy.
GCTC’s Coma Unplugged plays the main stage of the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre at Holland and Wellington through December 14th; call (613) 236 -5196 for tickets and information.
