By James Karas
We the Family is a new play by George F. Walker that received its premiere at
Hart House Theatre as the first production of its 2105-2016 season. Stand up
and applaud enthusiastically.
The play
promises multicultural mayhem, love, larceny and death! Prick up your ears. There
are vast possibilities for examining multicultural conflicts in Toronto and as
for the rest, well, love, larceny and death are always welcome on stage.
Phoebe Hu, Sarah Murphy-Dyson and John Cleland. Photo: Scott Gorman
In the eighty
minutes’ performance, you will get some superficial satire of multicultural
conflicts, a tad of love, a dose of lust, some gratuitous criminal conduct and
a large quantity of jokes some of which are quite funny. But the plot takes so
many twists and turns, so quickly that there is no room left for any character
development. The episodes come on so quickly, that there is very little time to
consider anything. In the end Walker seems to have run out of steam and brought
the thing to a quick end after only an hour and twenty minutes. Take a deep
breath and a sigh of disappointment.
On the bright
side, director Andrea Wasserman and the cast do heroic work to bring this play
to life. They do get some laughs and handle Walker’s black comedy well but the
play serves them badly because most of the characters are papier mache
caricatures rather than human beings.
The
multicultural clash involves Jews, Chinese and Catholics when a Jewish young
man marries a Chinese woman. We never see the couple but we learn that they are
kidnapped on their honeymoon. David Kaplan (John Cleland) is the wealthy and
creepy father of the groom who wants to negotiate a good deal with the
kidnappers. He enlists his Russian mistress Sonya (Jessica Allen) to use her
crime boss father in Russia to help with the negotiations.
In the meantime
his crazy, alcoholic and psychotic wife Lizzie (Sarah Murphy-Dyson), is seeing
a psychiatrist who does not have an office (played by Renée Haché) and an Arab
(played by Mike Vitovich). She wants to kill her husband.
David’s father
Sonny (David Cairns) is a criminal while his wife Merle (Connie Guccione) is a
racist nut.
The Chinese
family is not much better but there are only two of them: Jenny (Phoebe Hu),
the mother of the unseen bride and her daughter Lucy (Sherman Tsang).
The several
compartments of Brandon Kleiman’s dark set serve well for the numerous scene
changes from a bedroom, to a courtroom, to a restaurant scene and a highway.
Walker in the
end seemed to have run out of twists and he brought people back from the dead.
By then there was nowhere to go but drop the curtain which he does.
In the end your
enthusiasm has waned and you are left unsatisfied by unfulfilled expectations
and you applaud the director and the actors for their work as you scratch your
head about why a fine playwright like Walker allowed a half-baked script to be
produced.
__________
We the Family by George F. Walker played from September 18 to
October 3, 2015 at Hart House Theatre, 7 Hart House Circle, Toronto, Ontario. www.harthousetheatre.ca Telephone (416) 978-8849
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