Calpurnia can’t quite resolve its provocative premises

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This article was published 25/03/2022 (1651 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Audrey Dwyer’s Calpurnia decisively opens up several cans of worms — race, class, gender and privilege among them — guaranteed to send theatre-goers into the night buzzing with more questions than answers.

The Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre mainstage production is provocative and bold, but too many of the worms in those open cans wriggle away without proper examination.

Calpurnia opens on Julie Gordon (Emerjade Simms) at the dining room of her family’s well-appointed home, laptop open. A novice screenwriter, she’s penning a script that flips Harper Lee’s venerated 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird to reflect the perspective of the Finches’ Black family maid, Calpurnia.

She’s received notes from her agent informing her rewrites are necessary, as she hasn’t captured the voice of the character.

The family’s Filipina housekeeper, Precy Cabigting (Rochelle Kives), arrives — on her day off, Mother’s Day Sunday, no less — to get the house ready for a dinner guest, a senior partner at a law firm Julie’s father Lawrence (Ray Strachan) is hoping will hire her brother Mark (Kwaku Ado-Poku).

Julie offers her a copy of Mockingbird to read in her “downtime,” hoping to interview her about her experiences as a domestic to flesh out her potrayal of Calpurnia.

Mark, meanwhile, thinks Julie’s on a fool’s errand. Not only does he love Mockingbird (both book and film), he believes his sister — an affluent Jamaican Canadian who still lives at home with her father — can’t have any real insight into the experience of a Black woman in 1930s Alabama; he points out that she doesn’t even know any Black men other than him and Lawrence.

His girlfriend Christine (Ellie Ellwand), who is white, is more supportive, if at comical pains to prove it.

Lawrence, meanwhile, coddles both his children, perhaps in reaction to the death of their mother when they were small.

In the second act of this intentionally uncomfortable comedy (two hours with intermission) the family squabbles are magnified into a true cringefest with the arrival of glib dinner guest James Thompson (Arne MacPherson) and Julie’s audacious choice of action that shall not be spoiled here.

Julie is tough to like, petulant and entitled, but Simms gives her a compelling energy. The character of James, however, feels less like a real person than an archetype designed to tick off boxes illustrating problematic behaviour.

Here she (Rochelle Kives) is aided by Rachel Forbes’ spectacular set, which emulates the Gordons’ modern upper-class home in the Forest Hills suburb of Toronto.

Although Kives seems too young for the role, she deserves kudos for her very present non-presence as Precy. Stage busywork can often be distracting, but she goes about the business of “cooking” and “cleaning” with the economical movements of someone who is used to being unseen in a room while other people talk around her.

Here she is aided by Rachel Forbes’ spectacular set, which emulates the Gordons’ modern upper-class home in the Forest Hills suburb of Toronto. The open-concept space — kitchen, dining area and living room — allows for multiple planes of action that director Sarah Garton Stanley puts to good use. However, with dialogue that’s rapid-fire and often overlapping, a lot of lines are inaudible.

Ellwand does great things with what could be a largely expository role, bringing a daffy physical aspect to her well-meaning attempts to be a good ally.

Gordon has a lot of plates spinning here, and while most are worthy of attention, some distract from the action (Lawrence’s string-pulling for his kids and Christine’s insistence on a girls’ trip to St. Barts chief among them), while others feel piled on to a story already rife with complications. Mammy culture, microaggressions, allyship, privilege, white supremacy: it’s a lot to pack in and the pace to unpack it all feels frantic.

And what one assumes is the central plot — Julie’s failure to recognize the hypocrisy in her treatment of Precy while raging about the fictional portrayal of Calpurnia — gets oddly short shrift. Precy has her moment, but the action then spins in less-satisfying directions and sputters out.

jill.wilson@winnipegfreepress.com