Powerful personal drama provides both bark and bite

Well before playwright Rafaella Marcus’ words have the chance to entangle us in the stickiness of Sap, the performance space initiates the task in director Elio Zarrillo’s staging of this discomfiting and affecting story of restraint and liberation.

Shortly after the audience takes its seats in four segments surrounding a central channel — a shimmering tunnel containing cellist Grace Morningstar — it becomes clear as actors Hera Nalam and Liz Whitbread make their way around the tight corners of David Oro and Hazel Venzon’s set that certain actions will go unseen unless viewers keeps their heads on a swivel: in a production meant to uproot understanding, a fixed perspective will never do.

In this vulnerable and powerful production from Theatre by the River (105 minutes) the actors meet the excellence of Marcus’s twisty script, which calls for emotionally draining and jolting depictions of a relationship headed down a rocky road.

Nalam plays a young communications pro for a women’s aid charity whose dating life is a work in progress. She’s bright and optimistic, taking notice of elements of nature that nobody else seems to recognize. On her daily commute, she looks out from the bus window in awe of a home overflowing with branches and leaves.

Her character could be compared to that underappreciated flora: her boss Miriam (Whitbread, in one of several roles) is the type of woman a certain type of man would refer to as an “absolute 10.” Nalam’s character, meanwhile, doesn’t even receive a name, let alone a number rating.

This absence of title is notable, as Nalam’s character reveals in reflecting on her early 20s, when her identity — “an out, proud bisexual” — began to feel juvenile. “So I stopped calling myself anything.”

So her surprise is potent when a confident woman — “the absolute queen of my type” — sidles up at a lesbian bar, making her own settings-based assumptions in the process.

A hookup leads to a long-term relationship, but Nalam’s character experiences fear and doubt from the start, when her “Wonder Woman” offers a glimpse at her own past relationships: in every relationship with a bisexual woman, after a certain peak, each one failed; she’ll never date another bisexual woman, Wonder Woman says — they waste her time.

So Nalam’s character buries her truth, flattening her past in order to fit within her partner’s preferred sexual taxonomy. “Already, the lie is rapidly cooling into fact,” she says.

It’s not long before the kernel of that unexpressed biographical detail pops in wildly unexpected and challenging fashion, taking cues from Cruel Intentions, Titus Andronicus and Fleabag as the characters find themselves bound in uncomfortable but realistically depicted situations predicated on stalking, entrapment and sexual assault.

The emotional zigs and zags of the script — which often verge into grotesque territory via Whitbread’s amoral depiction of a troubled young man — are effectively mirrored in the original compositions of Morningstar, who translates the rising blood pressure and panic experienced by Nalam’s character into jagged cello verse.

Although Nalam’s inner monologue is the driving force for the production’s retrospective, conversational tone, Morningstar’s instrument says aloud the things her character cannot find the words to express.

This is most potent during a pivotal chase scene, when Nalam’s character makes a midnight escape into an arboretum, girding herself within the bark of a tree as a protective shell.

Planted in safe territory, she’s able to walk away from this chapter of her life, revitalized but not unchanged. What comes next?

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca

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