University of Ottawa seeks balance in a challenging play by Carole Frechette

Ambiguity is a driving force of Quebec dramatist Carole Frechette’s gripping play, The Small Room At The Top Of The Stairs. More specifically it’s about the terrors that can lurk within that ambiguity — an element pursued by director Milena Buziak in her new production for the University of Ottawa Drama Department.

Uncertainty can wreak havoc on  a fragile  psyche, and newly married Grace is a prize specimen for a playwright whose cunning stage piece may present the outward trappings of a horror story but which is really concerned with the monsters that can rage within us.

Here we have a variation on the Bluebeard mythology. And the narrative springboard is a familiar one. What secret lies behind that closed door at the top of a hidden staircase? What will happen to Grace if she disobeys husband Henry’s fierce injunction that she not investigate?

Roger Schultz’s minimalist set is skeletal and angular. That narrow stairway rising to that closed door seems almost suspended in a  void. And here, Schultz has a responsive colleague in lighting designer Paul Auclair in communicating an eerie sense of darkness visible.

The play, offered here in an admirable translation by Calgary’s John Murrell, intrigues because — although seemingly anchored to emotional reality — it’s not quite of this world. There’s an ominous  fairy-tale dimension here, and that’s not surprising given Frechette’s interest in seeking  a new variation on the Bluebeard legend. So we don’t need naturalistic trappings to believe that Grace is the equivalent of a fairytale princess freshly married to a wealthy husband who has deposited her as some kind of trophy in a luxurious, many-roomed  mansion, a place that emerges for us as a castle of the imagination and offers her everything she could dream for. Except, of course, permission to pass through that door at the top of the stairs into the forbidden room.

So naturally, as soon as Henry departs on a business trip, Grace must satisfy her curiosity and break her promise. Reason deserts her and, as Goya once observed, the sleep of reason brings forth monsters.

But what kind of monsters? And why is she attracted to the horror within that room — if, in fact that horror exists?

Frechette teasingly suggests various possibilities and explanations. Want to buy into those ghostly manifestations as the real McCoy? Or maybe remain resolutely earthbound and decide that Grace is a walking emotional inferno whose fevered perceptions are not to be trusted and whose personal relationships are an unholy mess? We can take our pick. Certainly a troubled family dynamic is at work here. You see it in Montana Adams’s persuasive portrayal of Grace’s flaky, indulgent mother. It’s there as well in Robin Breiche’s performance, the best of the evening, as the tough-minded sister coping with the knowledge that growing up, she has always been an also-ran to her “perfect” sister.

This is not a play necessarily suited to a student cast. But for that reason it can also serve as good testing ground. As Henry, the new husband, Eric Barrette exhibits a possessive pride in his beautiful acquisition. It’s a characterization that is unsettling, creepy and more than a little menacing. This guy is volatile: consider his abrupt transition from fawning spouse, clutching a bouquet of red roses, to a controlling household tyrant explosive with rage. When Barrette’s Henry walks into a room, spouting all the conventional terms of endearment, he brings unease. But to complicate matters, the script increasingly makes him vulnerable, and that factors as well into this performance. Meanwhile there’s also the enigmatic presence of his housekeeper — in Claire McCracken’s excellent performance exhibiting an icy devotion to her situation that is scarcely reassuring. This is an actress who would make a fascinating Mrs. Danvers.

Despite its enthusiasm for spooky situations, Frechette’s play is ultimately a character piece that digs into the fault lines of human behaviour. Jasmine Gulyas initially presents Grace as some idealized piece of perfection, secure in her own exceptionalism. But then that forbidden door beckons, and in responding to its lure,  her facade starts crumbling away. And thanks to this performance, we start getting glimpses of a tormented inner life.

Nevertheless, although the production compels our attention, how much does it really frighten? One thinks of a movie like Picnic At Hanging Rock whose horror rests in the fact that we never know what happened to those Australian schoolgirls who vanished during an outing in 1900. Or of producer Val Lewton’s low-budget horror classics which scared audiences by showing virtually no horror at all and embraced the adage that less is better than more. At U of O, the horror raises more goose pimples in anticipation than with what actually happens when Grace passes through that door. The script doesn’t make things easy for a director. The fear factor diminishes as Grace keeps venturing into the darkness — and need Frechette have been so repetitious? The law of diminishing returns is at work.  Furthermore, matters aren’t helped by back projections showing both Grace’s enlarged face and also vague representations of  her unspeakable discoveries in the gloom. The accompanying voiceover is required by the script and there’s potential here in bringing us into the workings of a possibly unreliable mind. But we are also seeing too much. It makes the intangible tangible. Mere suggestion is a much more potent device in creating terror than allowing us to close a look.

As to what a gifted playwright is really trying to say at the end of the evening’s 90 minutes — who knows? And maybe that’s the point.

 

The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs by Carole Frechette

Translated by John Murrell

Presented by the University of Ottawa Department of Theatre

Academic Hall to Nov. 3

Director: Milena Buziak

Set: Roger Schultz

Lighting: Paul Auclair

Sound: Allan Connors

Costumes: Erika Scrivens

CAST

Grace: Jasmyn Gulyas

Joyce: Montana Adams

Jenny: Claire McCracken

Henry: Eric Barrette

Anne: Robin Breiche