Photo: Marianne Duval

Director James Richardson has given us, as his thesis for an MFA in Directing at the University of Ottawa, a creative, focused and altogether compelling interpretation of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade.

The insane asylum that Richardson and his cast of student actors conjure is a fevered and dangerous place, a bubbling pot of injustice and brutality that constantly threatens to boil over.

Except for Charlotte Corday (Emma Hickey) – the narcoleptic who rouses herself long enough to murder Marat (Jeremie Cyr-Cooke), the revolutionary idealist with a really bad case of the itches, as he rests in his bath – the stage seethes and jitters with the non-stop twitches and outbursts of the patients. If ever there was a warning to iron-fisted leaders, whether they be political, cultural or of any other stripe, that repression has a limited shelf life, this is it.

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Photo. Maria Vartanova

The problem with Samuel Taylor’s 1953 comedy, Sabrina Fair, is the film version released by Paramount a year later.

The play begins with Sabrina, a chauffeur’s daughter, returning to the only real home she has known — a wealthy Long Island estate — after five years in Paris. Now an attractive young woman, she radiates poise and sophistication, but an infectious buoyancy also surfaces. The romantic yearnings of her adolescence also re-emerge — yearnings for the unattainable that suggest she doesn’t know her place in the social strata and is therefore destined to send the plot spinning into merry overdrive.

In the film, writer-director Billy Wilder bolstered this material with a solid back story so that we first see Sabrina as the dreamy, dangerously impressionable child she was before going to Paris. Playwright Samuel Taylor was so upset by this that he dissociated himself from the screen version — but the truth is that Wilder had improved on the original, giving it more substance and more social bite. Wilder also was playing an ace card in casting Audrey Hepburn — who, after her triumph in Roman Holiday, was the hottest new actress in Hollywood — in the title role.

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According to the Director’s Notes, Marion Bridge is about three East Coast women trying to tell their own story, and to get that story straight. Of course, the difficulty in getting any story straight is the myriad of personal details and emotions we keep locked up inside. The more we lock ourselves up, the easier it is to misunderstand and pass over each other’s perspectives, even if we’ve technically lived the same experiences. Marion Bridge is yet another dark comedy about a highly dysfunctional family. Stories like these are a dime a dozen. However, the heartwarming production of Marion Bridge differentiates itself by truly focusing on the humanity of its subjects – flaws, misunderstandings, and inner worlds. The production is engaging and compelling with the different aspects coming together to form a heart-warming whole.

The three sisters in Marion Bridge are brought together in Cape Breton in order to be with their dying mother. From the moment the play opens, the tension between them is palpable. Each of them, Agnes, Theresa, and Louise, carries her pain in a different way. Agnes (a furiously sarcastic Robin Guy) shields herself in alcohol and irony while struggling to make it as an actress in Toronto. Theresa (a restrained Shawna Pasini) is a nun who lives a cloistered life and blankets herself in responsibility. She is wound up so tightly that one gets the impression that event the slightest relaxation would find her crumbed on the floor. Louise (a wonderfully direct Cindy Beaton), the “strange one” of the family, lives in her own world of daytime television. As the story progresses and the women are faced with more obstacles (dinner with their estranged father, the death of their mother, etc), chinks begin appearing in their armour, bringing them closer together.  …

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Sabrina Fair is a Cinderella story that makes wealth the key to overcoming class differences.

In the 1964 movie adaptation of Samuel A. Taylor’s romantic comedy, which premiered on Broadway in 1953, Audrey Hepburn played Sabrina. As the daughter of the long-time chauffeur of a rich Long Island family returning after five years in Paris, her combination of innocence and sophistication was so memorable that her performance continues to cast a long shadow more than half a century later.

In the Ottawa Little Theatre production, directed by Venetia Lawless, the slim, dark-haired Jane Chambers plays Sabrina somewhat in the style and image of Hepburn. She even sounds a little like the movie star, particularly in the exposition-heavy Act I. Despite her lively characterization, Chambers — and Lawless — might have been wiser to present a slightly different take on Sabrina. (In fact, the playwright’s son, David Taylor, has been quoted as saying “My father said — I think quite rightly —  that to do the exact same movie that had been made in the 1950s was wrong, because the story didn’t make sense any more. [His] recommendation was: ‘At least cast a black actress!’”)

This aside, the OLT production is true to the time period (great costuming from Susan MacKinlay) and cast members have a clear understanding of their roles and social standing. …

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It’a difficult to understand the esteem in which Daniel MacIvor’s Marion Bridge is held in some quarters. Even with as solid a production as the one given it by Ottawa’s new Three Sisters Theatre Company, it remains a cliche-ridden excursion into the dreary world of family angst.

That’s not to say that this world isn’t worth exploring dramatically, The stark insights of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night or Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming testify to its continuing validity. But MacIvor’s play has nothing new to say in its portrait pf three sisters in a moment of crisis. And it certainly suffers from overload — as though weighting these siblings down with a catalogue of terrible events in their lives is sufficient to give the whole piece “significance.”

Well, not really. Not when the play’s psychology is pretty shallow, not when the pile-up of revelations starts veering into contrived soap opera. Not with a script afraid to acknowledge that the processes of reconciliation aren’t something that can be neatly brought off in two patently artificial hours of stage time.

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