Blood: a Scientific Romance marred by gothic melodrama
The Maggie Tree is a small feisty local company that dedicates itself to theatrical projects initiated by women.
Under that rubric they have given us a series of well-produced plays that have spoken to a wide audience of theatre-goers. Perhaps the best known was Nancy McAlear’s disquieting mounting of Belinda Cornish’s anti-animal testing Category E in 2015 – which won a Sterling Award and went on to subsequent productions elsewhere.
Maggie Tree’s latest is Meg Braem’s Blood: A Scientific Romance, which was nominated for a Governor General’s Award, and has been around for a while (you may remember it from a Fringe production). It plays at the Arts Barns’ Backstage Theatre until Oct. 27.
This is a flawed play with an interesting premise: Twin sisters Poubelle (Gianna Vacirca) and Angelique (Jayce McKenzie) share the mystical kind of bond that fraternal twins often possess. A horrific accident on a prairie highway in 1952 kills their parents and leaves the seven-year-old twins fatally injured. Miraculously they come back to life after being placed together in a room. The actors’ phenomenal performances certainly reinforce that ethereal bond.
The girls are brought to the home of one Dr. Glass (Liana Shannon) to recover. Dr. Glass is not a warm surrogate parent, and her interest in them is not rooted in love. Distant and brittle, she seems excessively interested in the bond that is shared between the two. She takes the girls to her house in the middle of the prairies, 70 miles from the nearest centre, and the girls find themselves the subject of seemingly endless studies. One particularly barbaric test has one twin immersed in freezing water to see if the other is physically and emotionally reacting to her sister’s distress.
This leads to creepy echoes of the Nazi monster Dr. Mengele who conducted genetic research on twins with little regard to his victims’ well being.
With deft direction from Brenley Charkow’s direction (and Leif Ingebrigtsen’s atmosphereic music and sound design), Vacirca and McKenzie are a revelation and easily stand out as the best thing about this production. They indeed act like twins with little shared gestures and hidden intimacies. The two look much the same and often speak in shared rhyming couplets. They not only capture the vulnerable youth of the girls, but their characters believably mature and change under the perverse treatment of their tormentor.
Doctor Max (Jenna Dykes-Busby) arrives fresh from university down east and sets up a four-sided emotional disarray that threatens Dr. Glass’ experiment. (In the original play, both doctors were played by male actors but the gender switch, in keeping with the feminist leanings of the company, works well enough). Lianna Shannon gives a solid performance as the conflicted doctor. Jenna Dykes-Busby doesn’t generate a lot of sympathy, playing mostly the ticks, twitches and stammers in a role that doesn’t give her much room to play.
The twins are approaching the age of 18, when the Dr. Glass can no longer can control them, so time is running out to find the connection that bonds them.
The play then goes all Prairie Gothic. The bad doctor descends into madness, and takes the play with her into darkest melodrama. There are echoes here, not of Dr. Mengele, but of that other mad German doctor whose science project went terribly wrong. The science is suspect, the characters are driven by plot mechanics and the ending, striving for some kind of classical tragic proportion, is hard to swallow.
