How it Works: Stories from a dysfunctional family.

 

Photo by Andrew Alexander. Hannah Kaya (Brooke) and    Donna (Geneviève Sirois).

Where would we be without our stories? In more trouble, it seems, than we already are. Sories – certainly when they’re about our own lives – are how we dilute pain and celebrate the good stuff by sharing the tales with others. By sharing difficult past events we can also separate those events from ourselves enough to put them into perspective and move on.

That’s pretty much how it works in How It Works, Daniel MacIvor’s play about a dysfunctional family’s stumbling toward the light or at least toward a brighter shade of dark. And despite some problems on opening night, Plosive Productions captures well this story about stories.

MacIvor, weaving flashbacks into his narrative, tracks the increasingly complex interplay between four people: Al (David Whiteley), a cop looking for a settled life; his perceptive, beer-chugging, girlfriend Christine (Michelle LeBlanc); Al’s uptight ex, Donna (Geneviève Sirois); and Brooke, Al and Donna’s drug addicted, 19-year-old daughter (Hannah Kaya).

It’s a potent mix of characters, each damaged in his or her own way but all accessible to any theatregoer with even a modicum of self-recognition.

As the four wade through their personal and joint issues, most of the latter revolving around Brooke’s addiction, they have no clear sense of where they are going or how to get there. “Don’t ask me what you’re supposed to do; I’m a stranger here myself,” shouts Brooke to her father at one point, neatly encapsulating the human condition.

They are all looking for how it works but flying by the seat of their collective pants. And like the game of Scrabble which becomes a key metaphor in the play, the four are trying to build words that will explain themselves to themselves and to others but without having all the right letters.

Under director Stewart Matthews, all this takes too long to gel even though MacIvor’s style of storytelling itself is an often-fragmentary one in which the parts take a while to coalesce into a full picture.

But when the show does gel — on opening night, during the awkward first meeting between Christine and Donna a good quarter of the way into the story — the production comes into its own and then rolls along through confrontations and crises and some funny moments to the play’s surprisingly upbeat conclusion.

Annoyingly, LeBlanc as Christine is often inaudible. She doesn’t enunciate or project properly, a problem that’s dogged her work in previous shows, and that’s a particular issue here since her character is a linchpin to the others and to the story.

Whiteley, though wooden in the early going, settles into his role. Sirois’ fragile intensity is credible if a tad unrelenting. Kaya, still a high school student but with a strong stage presence, is good as Brooke who punctuates her sentences with “omigods” a-plenty as she bounces between irony and vulnerability and edges toward the moment of telling the story about what plunged her into unhappiness and addiction….Read more.

Pblished for the Ottawa Citizwn. October 5, 2012