Family drama lacks dimension

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This article was published 02/04/2011 (5615 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

They say every family is like a hanging mobile, balanced and interconnected.

If one piece moves — say, if someone changes a behaviour pattern — the whole system is disturbed.

Three characters in Michael Nathanson’s new comedy-drama at Winnipeg Jewish Theatre, One of Ours, form a mobile that hasn’t shifted in a very long time.

Mark (Adrian Marchuk) and Janice (Aviva Hoffman) are a wealthy Jewish couple in their 30s. He’s a super-competitive, insufferably cocky Tom Cruise type who runs the businesses he and his brother inherited from their father, golfs and probably cheats on his wife.

She buys designer clothes, frets about her cellulite, flips through architectural magazines with a bored air, and sedates herself with sleeping pills and vodka. (If those sound like convenient rich-people stereotypes, that’s one of the play’s problems.)

Their marriage has turned cold. They trade bitchy, profanity-laced barbs that range from limp to sharply funny.

When Simon, Mark’s shlumpy underachiever brother (the well-cast Dov Mickelson) visits, the three maintain a pattern: Janice dotes on him while Mark torments him about his poor golf game, passivity and nonexistent work ethic. In the family code, this is called “kibitzing.”

On this particular weekend at Mark and Janice’s lavish cottage, the dynamic is disrupted. Simon has brought along his New Yorker goyishe girlfriend of three months, an actress who’s at least 15 years younger (vibrant Gwendolyn Collins, who gives a capable performance but is not for a minute plausible as non-Canadian).

Simon plans to marry this free spirit, who shocks Janice, and perhaps some in the audience, by baring her breasts and proposing a skinny dip. Mark and Janice assume she’s a user/gold digger. Her unlikely name is Lily Chill.

“Maybe it’s her porn name,” Mark quips. “She sounds like a Slurpee,” says Janice.

There’s nothing original about the “culturally foreign guest as catalyst for change” premise, nor the play’s structure. The minimalist set unfortunately leaves all the weight on the cast to draw us into a believable world.

Over the course of two hours (including intermission), writer-director Nathanson keeps the bantering pace strong and holds our interest, building sexual tension between Mark and Lily and bully/victim tension between the brothers, as well as questions about Lily’s motives and where the two relationships are headed.

But some of the interactions and dialogue are false and far-fetched. Mark’s smug superiority is caricatured, both as scripted and as acted by Marchuk.

Lily, who has no filters on what she’ll say, unleashes therapy-style analyses of Mark and Janice’s insecurities and fears. If she’s so emotionally wise, however, why does she initiate a scantily clad middle-of-the-night encounter with Mark and ask him to dance?

How can she not be aware that the instant intimacy she fosters will be like a drug to Mark? Her behaviour serves the plot, but isn’t consistent with what Nathanson wants us to believe about Lily.

The playwright has something to say about human decency versus material wealth and external beauty, about art people (Simon’s true love is the theatre) versus business people, and about soul-destroying family roles and tribal insularity.

That’s all valid, but One of Ours is the kind of piece that only works if we’re honestly engaged with the characters. Because they’re more surface-drawn types than rounded individuals, this trip to the lake is more quick skinny dip than dive to the depths.

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca