REVIEW: Surreal Middletown sees characters askew in search of a plot
Will Eno is an American playwright whose works have gained some notoriety in the past decade or so – winning awards, attracting and often dumbfounding audiences.
He takes ordinary situations and runs them through his cracked view of life. As a small American town in Middletown, currently in production from the U of A’s Studio Theatre at the Timms Centre for the Arts until April 6.
Eno’s plays divide audiences. Some like them, some don’t. I was not much a fan of his The Realistic Jonses (set in a backyard get-together). Middletown – “a small town, like any other small town located in the middle of the middle” – moves ahead in bursts and starts. It’s very funny in parts. In others his writing is quite graceful as the playwright “meditates on the bleak and beautiful mysteries of human experience.”
The first half is considerably brighter – even playful. In fact, there is an amazing, high speed introductory burst from Lauren Hughes that invokes an entire cosmos that all comes together in a single sentence, hilariously explaining all that has gone before. When the fancy takes Eno, he can be an explosively funny writer. If someone makes an observation to a character the reaction could easily be, “I know you are just making sounds with your mouth.”
All the characters seem slightly askew. Middletown could easily fit under Samuel Beckett’s leafless tree. A group of somewhat recognizable characters live out their lives. They come and go, babies are born and people die.
“In Middletown, we get you coming and going,” someone remarks. An astronaut looks down from above. There is a doctor, a handyman who develops a friendship with a young married woman, a nosy cop, an alcoholic mechanic and others. The characters have generic names. The town’s bubbly librarian can’t quite figure out how the library works; the books on childbirth are in the business section. Some scenes seemed to be clipped from other plays, which makes for some really funny dialogue.
After the interval, Eno shifts gears and we abandon the surreal. The playwright appears to be doing an update on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The humour drifts away as Eno gets serious. The play hasn’t allowed us much empathy for the characters- and now they are embarked on some kind of existential journey.
John Dodge (Michael Anderson) and the pregnant Mrs. Swanson (Sarah Emslie) showed some signs of mutual interest, but that fizzles out. Emslie is appealing and Anderson adroitly finds the line between his divided character. The cheery librarian (Melanie Bahniuk) is particularly moving in an Eno monologue in which she intuits what a little girl who once read one of the books was looking for when she wrote a simple question mark in the margin. And Griffin Cork is given some moving words as a doctor who explains to the worried mother-to-be how love will make everything right. There is no plot. The story, such as it is, is told through a series of vignettes, and Eno’s well-known love of the monologue. The act drones along with a series of endings – that never really end. Maybe the Cop (Leila Raye-Crofton) checking out the town sees something through the windows we don’t. Not even the rousing final notes of Beethoven’s 9th can end the act.
Sandra M. Nicholls’ production, though, is something else. As an actor and director (and an eminence grise to many young people at the U of A Drama Department), she has been very prominent on the local scene. In Middletown, maneuvering between surreal and “real” elements of the play, she squeezes the last drop of “humanness, invention, humour and humility” out of the vehicle. She has benefited from an excellent year of BFA acting students: all are substantial – some quite remarkable.
Photos by Ed Ellis
READ MORE: Review of last Studio Theatre production, All For Love
