Gabriel Richardson and Ellie Heath in Jupiter, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
“The future doesn’t happen ahead of time,” says a character in Jupiter, clinging to shards of hope for change. But the baleful grandeur, and dark vivid theatricality, of this new multi-generational family epic from the dauntless Canadian playwright Colleen Murphy argue otherwise.
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Jupiter premieres in a stunning Bradley Moss production at Theatre Network. The grand finale of the company’s 50th anniversary season, powerfully acted and directed, reunites a playwright and director with a long-time association (Pig Girl, Armstrong’s War, The Society for the Destitute Present Titus Bouffonius). And it populates the stage, a single living room designed by Tessa Stamp, with three generations of the working-class Hutchinson family (five humans and a dog) in a present (2015) that’s simultaneously embedded as the past in a three-decade time span (2030 and 2050).
“Kill me yesterday,” says exasperated mom and step-mom Violet (Cathy Derkach) in a throwaway line that echoes tellingly in the sealed time chamber in which the Hutchinsons struggle. Exactly. This is a family that has a lot of trouble burying their dead — people or dogs, bodies or ashes. And in time, beer-soaked patriarch Winston (Brian Dooley), who refers to newspaper astrology columns as “horrorscoops,” will have trouble remembering who’s alive and who’s dead.
No wonder. The Hutchinsons are haunted — by ghosts, chronic dysfunction, dark secrets, whole subterranean veins of passion, grievance, and guilt.
Ellie Heath, Cathy Derkach, Brian Dooley in Jupiter by Colleen Murphy, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson.
Welcome to Murphy’s working-class, hourly-wage House of Atreus. As the play opens, the Hutchinsons are preparing a 21st birthday celebration — with balloons, cake and wieners, all Vi’s doing — for Toby (Gabriel Richardson), Winston’s son by his first wife. And against the backdrop of criss-crossed bickering you realize is chronic, we meet Emma (Ellie Heath), Vi and Winston’s daughter. She’s a bright and brainy high school achiever kid immersed in a science experiment involving germ cultures and dog saliva, with dreams of med school. And she’s in tough chez Hutchinson.
Near the outset we also meet Axel, the stage debut of charismatic golden retriever Monk Northey, a scene-stealer in his brief time onstage. His presence is a fractious family’s bond; his entrance is greeted by the audience with a collective sigh of happiness. Axel is effortlessly redeeming himself from having dug around in Vi’s peonies. No other redemption in Jupiter has the same unqualified success.
Ellie Heath, Brian Dooley, Monk Northey in Jupiter by Colleen Murphy. Photo by Ian Jackson
Designer Stamp creates the Hutchinson living room, in detail, complete with plastic plants, time-worn couch, and crocheted afghan, lighted by Larissa Poho as a sort of working-class headquarters. It’s by no means a dive, as tended by the indefatigable Violet; the empties accumulate invisibly in the back yard and downstairs. The sound design, by Darrin Hagen and Morag Northey, has a curious combination of lyrical cello riffs and a sort of ticking pattern, the metronome of passing time?
One of the challenges to which Moss’s excellent cast rises impressively is that the same actors play the characters at different ages. Jupiter doesn’t live in one-directional chronology, forward or back. The characters so seamlessly slide into older versions of themselves, leaving to grab a beer or find the dog and re-entering 15 years later — or the reverse 15 or 30 years earlier— that it comes to seem almost simultaneous. Are we inhabited inevitably and forever by our future and past selves? Jupiter has us wonder about that. It’s a disturbing line of inquiry. But when has Murphy ever shied away from human disturbances? The list of those here, as you’ll glean from a fulsome warnings list, includes addiction, suicide, and more.
Brian Dooley, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Ellie Heath in Jupiter, by Colleen Murphy. Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson
This might sound free-form. But Jupiter has an infrastructure. In a terrific performance by Heath, the arc of the play belongs to Emma. What happens to the promising kid, the vivacious smartie and her big plans, as she ages into her ‘30s, cracking a beer before work, and then furiously into her ‘50s? And Heath is compellingly watchable in transformations, back and forth in time, scene to scene.
The performances in Moss’s production are unafraid of harshness, and there’s a certain morbid hilarity in that. The Hutchinsons aren’t exactly shy sentimentalists; they call each other out and interrupt furiously at top-volume, in an intricate texture of overlapping shit-talking that’s captured, and vigorously, in the production. They have views, and they’ll argue about, well, any damn thing. Who ate the rest of the jam? Should poems rhyme? Is rehab just for “recovering losers”? They’re hard to impress. And as for family togetherness, consider that one of the few images of that is the comical moment they’re clustered around a controversial small portable fan in a heat wave.
Dooley’s alcoholic Winston, who has a work history in oil and meat-packing, seems to unravel before us, foul-mouthed, prickly, judgmental, full of denial and grievance and all-round negativity, with a certain dead-pan sense of humour. You kind of wince and kind of smile when you hear him describe his daughter’s seniors’ home care-giver job as “diaper-whisperer.”
Violet, the bustling mom/step-mother who waits tables in a diner, does the heavy lifting for the family. There’s a softer side to her, which seems to come from reading homilies and borrowing mantras from women’s magazines. Forgiveness, she says quoting Gandhi, is for strong people. Derkach is funny and convincing as a tough cookie whose ground zero is exasperation. “Do I look like I speak French?” she snaps, in a rejoinder to a gambit. Or “there are very few things I look forward to. A decent salad is one,” she says, briskly countering Emma’s incredulous look when prodded to do the croutons for the Caesar.
Richardson as stepson Toby, a screw-up car mechanic with a love for his truck only matched by his love for his dog, conjures a young man up against limited prospects. And as played by the excellent Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Emma’s daughter Avalon, the third generation of the play and the character least fleshed out by the script, sets her surly teenage self resolutely on a course apart. Whether she can find the exit to the living room, so to speak, is the question the play leaves with us.
An epic of unfulfillment, of disappointment, of anger and lost love, unfolds. “Sometimes you have to force yourself to dream up a happy ending,” according to Violet. And repeating a favourite quotation from something she’s read, she says “hope is like a bird that senses dawn, and starts to sing when it’s still dark.”
Well, it’s still dark, and the bird has been let out of the cage. And as this new absorbing new Canadian play sets forth, our options for self-creation are curtailed by what we inherit, and what we’re prepared to give up. Murphy has never been afraid to have her doubts, and face the tab.
REVIEW
Jupiter
Theatre: Theatre Network
Written by: Colleen Murphy
Directed by: Bradley Moss
Starring: Ellie Heath, Brian Dooley, Cathy Derkach, Gabriel Richardson, Dayna Lee Hoffmann, Monk Northey
Where: Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre, 10709 124 St.
Running: through April 20
Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca
