The Burden of Self Awareness – a spirited and merciless grim comedy.
Ottawa Citizen, June 5, 2014
Eric Coates as Michael (left), Samantha Madely (Lianne) in The Burden of Self Awareness at the Great Canadian Theatre Company. Photo Julie Oliver.
A breathtakingly incompetent psychiatrist lolling about in his underwear, a disrobed hooker, a private detective/hit man draped in a bathrobe: George F. Walker’s latest dark – make that exceedingly dark – comedy gives us a grim – make that exceedingly grim – vision of contemporary life shorn of its trappings.
Making its world premiere in this tight, spirited GCTC production, Walker’s show is rooted in a stripping down when the main character, the questing Michael (Eric Coates, aka artistic director of GCTC), decides to give away most of his fortune. Michael has had a close encounter with death, and in a cliché that’s so true to life that it’s not a cliché, is questioning the meaning of everything. “I don’t know what I believe,” he says at one point, that burden being a universal one in Walker’s disjointed, morally ambiguous world.
Michael’s decision is not greeted warmly by his acerbic, grasping and ultimately frightened wife Judy (Sarah McVie). She does her own share of stripping off (this show lives up to its billing of being for mature audiences only) but has no intention of seeing her husband’s wealth cast aside. “I can’t be poor,” she says to him. “You mean middle class?” he responds. “What’s the difference?” she snaps back.
That central conflict spins off the rest of Walker’s play. Its multiple scene changes quick-march us through sex, murder, and fraught, hilarious confrontations as Michael and Judy intersect with that anxiety-ridden psychiatrist Stan (Paul Rainville), university-educated hooker Lianne (Samantha Madely) and Jesus-is-my-personal-saviour private eye/hit man Phil (John Koensgen).
These characters are ones we both automatically scoff at — who hasn’t imagined a figure of authority or special knowledge, like Stan, vulnerably half-naked? – but also identify with: ask yourself, for example, whether you would go lightly from a world of privilege into a less-moneyed one.
Directed by Arthur Milner to move at the good clip that Walker’s writing demands, the show keeps you continually off-balance, searching for true north on the characters’ moral compasses and on your own. You also have no inkling of how the story will end until it does, an apt comment by Walker, a writer not unfamiliar with apt comments, on the futility of trying to control life through artificial constructs like money.
Martin Conboy’s set and lighting, Sarah Waghorn’s costumes, and Aymar’s sound design all conspire with a minimum of fuss to give the play its contemporary urban setting.
The one irritant is an unnecessary intermission. Thanks to vigorous performances by all cast members the momentum is quickly re-established post-break, but there’s no reason to interrupt an 85-minute show.
That misgiving aside, the production ends GCTC’s current season with an admirable bang.
Continues until June 22. Tickets: GCTC box office, 613-236-5196, gctc.ca