Pic from Toronto Stage
Toronto Stage: Tom McCamus
Audience Abuse of the Worst Kind
All things in life are possible but, of course, not all things are probable.
When you allow the improbable to take root into a story the way playwright Judith Thompson has freely done in Capture Me, the disappointing dramatic thriller on stage now at Tarragon, you have selected low-grade building material that makes for awful theatre.
The walls of the narrative appear sound: Congenial schoolteacher finds herself stalked by psychotic ex-husband, schoolteacher falls in love with immigrant cab driver, schoolteacher sets out to meet her biological mother that she has never known. Yet this script has looser shingles on its roof than a condemned building on Sherbourne Street.
How loose, you ask?
Jerry (Randi Helmers) teaches a kindergarten class. She's the stereotypical frontline educational worker or so we think. That is until Dodge (Tom McCamus) shows up to rekindle the abusive flame. The misconduct she suffered at the hands of Dodge goes far beyond the conventional brutality that female victims of domestic violence encounter and the playwright goes straight for shock factor.
Can this happen to a woman of sound mental capacity? Maybe, but not likely.
We’re told that the reason Jerry has stayed with Tom all those years is because she “didn't want to be alone.”
Do you accept this? For a few more scenes, perhaps. That is until a flashback discloses that she was a happy-go-lucky church girl when she met Tom who, at the time, was preaching that evil exists within all of us. The insinuation totally contradicts Jerry’s personal belief system yet they end up partnering anyway.
Capture Me climbs a few more flights up the stairwell of utter disbelief when she falls in love with Aziz (Maurice Dean Wint), a new to our country cab driver that has extreme difficulty comprehending her overt verbal affection for him. Hello??? He's a cab driver, would he not have eavesdropped on any backseat chatter by women conversing about the men in their lives? Then, in true soap operian style, she confronts her long lost medical profession mother dying of cancer at which time Delphine (Nancy Palk) begins to detail why Jerry was put up for adoption.
The only likable and credible character in the show is Jerry's yappy school teaching cohort, Minkle (Chick Reid) that supplies all the laughter in her comical accounts of sparring with parental units over the unacceptable behaviour and questionable performance of their kids. Minkle just makes sense in this troubled story whereas no one else does.
Aside from these bold character flaws, there are simply too many scenes that fail to advance the story; too much material that lacks cohesion. Thrillers don't often succeed in the theatre due to the medium's obvious limitations. However, when playgoers are asked to sit back and accept all that's not rational, the narrative wrecking ball makes a direct hit and everything comes crashing down.
Your heart goes out to the cast who give superb performances and hold together what little they can in Capture Me. Hats off to Andrea Lundy for manifesting a stream motif in the lighting design and John Gzowski for creating eerie aural sculptures.
In the end, theatrical rubble still ain't pretty to look at.
Review by Steven Berketo
© Toronto Stage
Return to The Mutant X Warehouse