PUBLIC ENEMY - REVIEW OF CANADIAN STAGE PRODUCTION OF CHOINIÈRE’S PLAY

Reviewed by James Karas

Welcome to dinner with a dysfunctional family. Public Enemy is a 90-minute play by Quebecois playwright Olivier Choinière now playing at the Berkeley Street Theatre in a production by Canadian Stage. Elizabeth (Rosemary Dunsmore), an elderly woman is having dinner with her three children and her two grandchildren. The grandchildren are soon sent to an adjoining TV room and the adults continue with an “adult” conversation. Not quite. They have two conversations going on at the same time conducted by two pairs and the grandchildren are heard intermittently arguing or fighting in the next room. You catch some of the conversations, but it is not easy to follow what they are all talking about.

About ten minutes later, the revolving stage turns revealing the grandchildren in the adjoining room. We are back to the beginning and the first ten minutes (I am not sure of the precise duration) of the play are repeated but this time we are watching the children’s activities and rehearing the conversation of the adults.

(L to R) Rosemary Dunsmore, Jonathan Goad, 

Finley Burke, Michelle Monteith, Maja Vujicic, 

Matthew Edison, Amy Rutherford. Photo by Dahlia Katz

The children, Tyler (Finley Burke) and Olivia (Maja Vujicic) get into a minor physical altercation and their fathers Daniel (Matthew Edison) and James (Jonathan Goad) start a more substantial fight. The scene changes to a balcony where a squirrel appears being handled by Daniel as if he were a puppeteer. Are we to I assume that it is a real squirrel, and its handler is not there? I am not sure. The grandson kills the squirrel.

The children are a little weird. Tyler is a hulk of a teenager that looks and is violent. Olivia is mysterious girl and between scenes we see a picture of her face that covers that entire stage staring at us. There must be a message there that I did not get.

Daniel has no job, and he has been living with his mother at her expense. He brings his girlfriend the floozie-looking Suzie (Amy Rutherford) to live with Elizabeth and that does not bode well for anyone except perhaps Suzie.

James and Melissa (Michelle Monteith) are part of the group with Melissa being an overprotective mother while the grandmother may be overly generous. But the family discussion does range over a wide span of tonics. Elizabeth is getting old, and she needs to be put in a nursing home. There are political and financial issues.

What Choinière represents on stage may ring true of how family dynamics work. Many can testify to two-, three- and four-way conversations going on around the dinner table simultaneously. The participants hear the conversation that he or she participated in without any concern about what the others were saying. Fair enough but we are not sitting at the table. We are are watching a performance and however realistic it may be, it is not satisfactory. Seeing the family talk at cross purposes at the table and then hearing the same conversation again from a different angle no doubt represents realism of sorts but my tolerance for it proved limited.

The plot gets clearer later and the fate of the old mother is at stake and where she will end up is of some consequence to her. But by that time, I had given up to trying to figure out who the public enemy of the title is and what the virtues of the play are for it to merit a production.  Some things are simply not to one’s taste.

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Public Enemy by Olivier Choinière, translated and adapted by Bobby Theodore  ran until October  2, 2022 at the Berkeley Street Theatre, 26 Berkeley Street, Toronto, Ontario.