Infinity: outstanding production of a problematic play
In terms of production quality, Infinity is probably as good as anything we’ve seen on an NAC stage in a while.
There’s Ross Manson’s excellent direction — responsive to the dramatic demands of Hannah Moscovitch’s script, adroitly managing its fluctuating rhythms and moods, seeking to give it substance and fluidity despite the authorial ambushes lying along the way.
In this, Manson is beautifully complemented by designer Teresa Przybylski’s deceptively simple cycloramic setting, which at times seems to be dissolving into destinations unknown. And she is supported here by lighting designer Rebecca Picherack who is making her own valuable contribution to a world of shifting shades and textures.
There’s more than enough here for us to forgive the tiresome bits of business involving what appear to be storage cartons and the jarring choreographic intrusions. But there is a certain musicality to this production in the NAC Studio — a quality that finds its most direct utterance in the presence of elegantly gowned violinist Andrea Tyniec who is sometimes a palpable presence on stage and sometimes a ghostly apparition behind a scrim. Her intense playing of composer Njo Kong Kie’s spare, raw, inquiring music seeks to serve as both commentary and counterpoint.
So there’s little doubt that Manson has delivered a thoughtful, dramatically aware remounting of a play that he first introduced to theatregoers in 2015 in Toronto. And he is favoured by a stellar cast: Paul Braunstein, as Eliot, a theoretical physicist obsessed with time to the detriment of his social skills and his capacity for sustaining a relationship; Amy Rutherford as Carmen, a musician and composer who falls into Eliot’s romantic orbit and pays a heavy price when she marries him; and finally Vivien Endicott-Douglas as Sarah Jean, the couple’s mathematician daughter and a strident bundle of neuroses.
In short, Ross Manson and his colleagues serve Moscovitch’s play well. But, in the process they must also seek to salvage it.
We’re told that Moscovitch had a lot on her mind when writing Infinity. There has been much ado in the advance hype and also in the NAC’s program notes about physics and the nature of time and Einstein’s very questioning of time’s existence. Director Ross Manson writes about “time and how we as humans, caught up in something so much bigger than ourselves, contend with it.” Undeniably, an honourable mission, but, as applied to this play, does it add up to anything more than much ado about nothing?
A more familiar theme supplants all this to dominate the evening — a theme having to do with a dysfunctional family, its disintegration served up in a succession of adroitly staged episodes. True, the elusive nature of time is a factor in the breakdown of the marriage depicted here, and Paul Braunstein, amiable in demeanour yet destructive in his self-absorption, is excellent as the obsessive physicist driven beyond reason to unravel the mysteries of the infinite. Yet, still, it’s the anatomy of marital breakdown that seizes and sustains our interest.
Moscovitch, with her knack for setting up a scene and her skill for characterization and incisive dialogue, gives Braunstein’s Eliot and Amy Rutherford’s Carmen the opportunity to deliver a couple of scorching domestic confrontations that also manage to be tinged with sadness and loss. And near the end, this prolific Canadian playwright startles with a brilliantly conceived death scene flickering with an awful irony.
Even so, we keep having to remind ourselves that the purported purpose of playwright and director has been to give us a play about time — and that for them it’s been an eight-year journey of inquiry. But despite the best of intentions, time is not of the essence here — except, perhaps, for those theatregoers who have been led in this direction by a reading of the program notes. To reiterate, it remains a piece about the fragility of personal relationships and the effect a disintegrating marriage has on a daughter, Sarah Jean, who reaches adulthood with a painfully warped view of love.
Moscovitch does write powerful individual scenes, but although skilfully executed by Manson and his cast, they emerge as just scenes, some more successful than others. These production values are such that it’s easy to overlook the fact that the initial encounter between Carmen and the socially awkward Eliot begins promisingly on a note of gauche charm before galloping to the big seduction moment in so perfunctory and swift a manner that, if you think too hard about what you’re seeing, it becomes psychologically and dramatically ludicrous. This is a production that papers over the cracks.
Moscovitch might better have damped down her sometimes unfortunate penchant for the Big Moment and paid more attention to giving more substance to Carmen who — notwithstanding a first-rate Amy Rutherford’s commitment to the part — seems an incomplete character. The deficiencies here seem particularly regrettable, considering that Carmen’s probing of key signatures and the bar-to-bar mysteries of a musical score could be providing a more effective counterpoint to Eliot’s own preoccupations with time. Furthermore, Moscovitch gives Carmen perhaps the most intriguing line in play — when she defines music as “a sculpture in time” — only to go nowhere with it. But of course part of the problem may be that Carmen’s creative identity has been outsourced to the often shadowy presence of violinist Andrea Tyniec and her music.
There’s another tantalizing but unfulfilled moment when there’s a reference to eternity versus infinity. Nuggets of interesting thought are all very well but what’s the purpose if there’s no real pay-off?
Two “time” lines will ultimately converge in Infinity, yet how idea-driven is it — really? That’s tricky to answer because more grounded narrative concerns dominate. And because the play moves along in a sequence of carefully-chosen scenes, which present a troubled marriage in a predominantly negative way, it lacks a persuasive arc. Moscovitch the playwright is too visibly in charge.
Perhaps though, this is because much of what happens in the play is viewed through the scarred and resentful prism of Sarah Jean, portrayed splendidly by Vivien Endicott-Douglas with the seething fury of one who feels she’s been betrayed by those she loves and by life itself.
This resourceful actress is equally convincing as a shrieking, bitterly unhappy eight-year-old and as an embittered young adult railing against the hand that her world has dealt her. But her primary way of communicating with us is through a series of monologues that show an explicitly detailed preoccupation with her unfulfilled sexual life. Hannah Moscovitch seems to have an affection for this motif. So Sarah Jean’s rants, evoking the dark humour of anger and despair, might seem more fresh were it not for the fact Moscovitch resorted to the same device with the more recent Bunny, which premiered last summer at the Stratford Festival. It’s a device that may have a more limited shelf life than this playwright is prepared to concede.
In the case of Bunny, we have a character named Sorrel with a passion for Victorian literature and a tendency to luxuriate in telling us about her adolescent angst and subsequent misadventures in living. In Infinity, we have Sarah Jean embracing mathematics while railing against her anguished family history. Both are characters in plays that aspire to weightier philosophical issues. And both can’t stop talking about sex.
So we have Bunny rhapsodizing about making love in a canoe, a memory that knowledgeable boating people would likely dismiss as a preposterous fantasy. And we have Sarah squeezing droplets of corrosive comedy out reminiscences about hand jobs and used tampons. This is stuff you might expect in a late-night comedy club — and that leads to one more factor common to the characters in both plays. Their monologue contributions are neatly concocted stand-up routines, and given that they invite a different kind of empathetic response from an audience, their usefulness to the plays as a whole seems problematic.
Yet Maev Beaty brought off these moments in Bunny with verve at Stratford, as does Endicott-Douglas in Infinity at the NAC. But in pursuit of what? Indeed, in the case of Infinity, you have a play sometimes at war with itself.
British playwright and critic J.B. Priestley wrote an entire book about time. And without claiming to make some kind of big metaphysical statement, he deftly incorporated these themes into plays like An Inspector Calls and Time And The Conways. But Priestley had no pretensions to be anything other than a popular playwright.
Infinity, presumes to be about big, revelant issues. Certainly that qualifies as a legitimate dramatic purpose, but one must look elsewhere for solid examples — John Mighton’s The Little Years, David Auburn’s Proof, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and 82-year-old George Bernard Shaw’s In Good King Charles Golden Days, which gets right to the heart of the matter with a witty debate about science, religion, politics and art.
And Infinity? Well its very real virtues are affirmed in a fine production. But still, there is less here than meets the eye.
Infinity by Hannah Moscovitch
A Volcano (Toronto) Production
NAC Studio to March 11
Director: Ross Manson
Set and costumes: Teresa Przybylski
Composer/music director: Njo Kong Kie
Choreographer: Kate Alton
Lighting: Rebecca Picherack
Cast:
Elliot Green……………………………….Paul Braunstein
Sarah Jean Green………………………….Vivien Endicott-Douglas
Carmen Green……………………………..Amy Rutherford
Violinist……………………………………Andréa Tyniec