Review: (Vancouver) Communion

Photo by Tim Matheson

Stunning production gets under your skin
The actors, the design, the direction, the script
by David C. Jones

“It’s the question” we are told from the beginning. We want comfort and clarity and certainty but how do we achieve it. We can clasp to our career, our religion, our relationships, or to booze and pills. We make choices but often lose confidence with them. We want advice and permission.

Daniel MacIvor is a renowned Canadian playwright, who explores morality and mortality, defensiveness and neediness and wraps it in dripping sarcasm.

This 2010 tale is told in three scenes and it concerns three women whose lives intersect. Leda is a recovering alcoholic with terminal cancer who is seeing a cool as cucumber psychotherapist named Carolyn who is helping her reconnect her former drug addict, now very devout, daughter named Annie.

Review: (Ottawa) Communion

Stephanie MacDonald and Jenny Munday. Photo by Janet MacLellan.

The Beauty of Simplicity
MacIvor conquers at NAC
By Jim Murchison

The play starts in a therapist’s office while it rains. The rain effect is evoked by Ingrid Risk and Leigh Ann Vardy's lighting playing on the backdrop of Victoria Marston's wonderfully minimalist set. The way the light splashes on the frosted backdrop looks a little bit like the aurora borealis. This opening image is a fitting parallel of the way I feel about this Daniel MacIvor play. It is at once simple and direct, yet layered with subtle nuance and profoundly beautiful.

Even the costuming by Janet MacLellan represents two stages of a person's journey. The first time we meet each one of three women they are wearing their appropriate costume: cancer patient for one woman, therapist for another and  religious zealot for the third. The next time we meet them they are basically in their civvies and freer to love, doubt or cry as the case need be.