And Slowly Beauty

For the Ottawa Citizen

Can art transform the viewer? If your name is Mr. Mann, then yes – or at least it can be a catalyst in finding yourself. And in a world where there’s insufficient time to even get through your daily to-do list, being inspired to go looking for yourself is no mean thing.

Mr. Mann, a genuinely nice, slightly sad-faced middle-aged guy who you’d pay no heed were you to pass him on the street, is the central figure in And Slowly Beauty …, Michel Nadeau’s warm and insightful play from 2003. The six-person show is making its English language premiere – and a fine premiere it is – at the NAC following a well-received run in Victoria.

Translated by Maureen Labonté, the play tracks Mr. Mann (the accomplished, resonantly voiced Dennis Fitzgerald), who is a kind of contemporary Everyman navigating a distracting world in search of personal redemption, after his life is changed by the seemingly simple act of attending a performance of Anton Chekhov’s play Three Sisters.

He goes to the show after winning a couple of tickets in a draw at his office, a soul-deadening social agency that has traded its reason for existence for an endless round of revisioning and synergizing and all those other things that organizations and their employees get sucked into doing. The play is set in Quebec City, but the very funny scene in which Mr. Mann addresses a group of five employees, who respond in incomprehensible cheeps and growls, about an equally incomprehensible restructuring exercise, must have special resonance for Ottawans who labour away in the public service.

Unable to convince any of his family to accompany him (the other five cast members do a deft job of playing multiple characters, from Mr. Mann’s wife and children to his fellow office drones to street people), Mr. Mann goes alone to the show. (. Because this is a review for the  Citizen, we are not allowed to reproduce Mr. Langston’s full text).

 

Published by The Ottawa Citizen, Thursday November 10, 2011