By James Karas
Domesticated is a new play by Bruce Norris and it has received its Canadian
premiere at the Berkeley Street Theatre. It has some funny writing and
interesting scenes but it is an unfinished work that needs some editing.
The plot is
taken from headline news that occur all too frequently. A successful politician
is caught with a prostitute. He appears on national television, his wife beside
him, blurting a grovelling apology – mea
culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Akosua Amo-Adem, Martha Burns and Paul Gross
Bill Pulver
(Paul Gross), gynaecologist-turned-politician has been caught in a hotel room
with a prostitute named Becky (Vanessa Smythe). She accidentally falls, hits
her head and lapses into a coma.
We soon find out
that Bill is a serial philanderer and a congenital idiot. His wife Judy (Martha
Burns) is quite understandably furious with him. Her fury increase exponentially
when she finds out that he was watching
pornography at work and paying one thousand to two thousand dollars per session
with a prostitute for an approximate total of $75,000.00. Judy writes a book
about her life and her husband.
For Bill, the situation
hits bottom when Judy finds out that he had an encounter with her best friend
Bobbie (Torri Higginson) in a car during which Bobbie provided only manual
stimulation or, more crudely, a hand job.
There is enough substance
in the hurt, anger, humiliation, desire for revenge and possible reconciliation
in the situation but Norris does unsatisfactory work with it. A young girl
steps up to the microphone a few times during the performance and describes the
sexual and reproductive lives of animals. It is pointless and unnecessary at
best. Cut it out.
The good lines
are given mostly to Judy and many of them are funny but Norris seems to run out
of steam and goes searching for coals to stoke the fire.
Bill and Judy as
well as Becky and her mother (Nicola Lipman) appear on a TV talk show. The host
(played hilariously by Akosua Amo-Adem) is an effusive and dramatic woman who
wants to hear her own voice and occasionally the voice of her guests. We get
several very funny scenes thanks to Amo-Adem.
Bill is
humiliated, leaves his wife and children, is unemployed, needs medical
attention and has no insurance. One would think that he might have learned
something about his failings as a human being, achieved a passing acquaintance with
contrition and made some attempt at reconciliation with a promise of fidelity. Not
so. He is so dense he cannot accept the idea of fidelity or much of anything
else.
Norris is again hard
put to fill the 160 minutes, including intermission, and he writes a scene in a
bar with a transsexual who throws a punch at him and detaches the retina in one
of his eyes.
The scenes with
Bobbie are more effective partly I suppose because Higginson does such a fine
job. Burns turns in a stellar performance. Gross gets very little to say in the
first act but he gets better lines in the second act without his character
becoming a more perceptive man.
The play uses
minimal sets (designed by Nick Blais) and the scenes flow from one to the next
seamlessly. A table and chairs, a bar, a set for the talk show sequence is all
that is used.
Director Philp
Riccio does a fine job of minimizing the creaks of the play and going for the
good lines but there is only so much you can do with an unfinished play.
______
Domesticated by Bruce Norris continues until
December 19, 2015 at the Berkeley Street Theatre, 26 Berkeley Street, Toronto,
Ontario. www.canadianstage.com 416 368 3110