Coralie Cairns, Davina Stewart, Nikki Hulowski in Where You Are, Shadow Theatre. Set and lighting Daniel vanHest, costumes Leona Brausen. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
There’s no shortage of funny one-liners in Where You Are. And a lot of them happen in the opening scenes of the carefully constructed 2019 comedy by the Canadian playwright Kristen Da Silva.
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We meet two retirement-age sisters who live in idyllic tranquillity on Manitoulin Island. They’re high-contrast siblings. Suzanna (Coralie Cairns) is the flamboyant extrovert, who emerges at the crack of noon declaiming at the chickens, and looking like Sarah Bernhardt after a bender. Glenda (Davina Stewart) is the calm one with the dry, undercutting wit. She’s just back from church, an expedition on behalf not of organized religion but of gathering gossip about the neighbours and selling home-made jam.
Where You Are, Shadow Theatre. Set and lighting Daniel vanHeyst, costumes Leona Brausen. Photo by Marc Chalifoux.
In John Hudson’s handsomely appointed production, they live in an old-fashioned wood-framed two-storey house (with shed and hydrangeas), in another fulsome and beautiful design by Daniel vanHeyst. His lighting captures a suffusing golden glow at every time of day into summer night. This is the rural Ontario of your dreams; it occurred to me that I’ve never lived in a house as nice as the one on the Varscona stage (maybe they do rentals).
Coralie Cairns and Davina Stewart in Where You Are, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and lighting Daniel vanHeyst, costumes Leona Brausen.
The sibs, a sitcom duo, are set boldly forth, in performances by Cairns and Stewart. Cairns has a high-beam smile that could melt the ice in a rum punch at 100 paces. The latter leans to the bemused eye-roll and deadpan comeback. They have comic rapport onstage. And their repartee lobs some hand-picked lines our way — about country life (“I’ve seen productions of King Lear with less conflict,” says Glenda), veterinary science, nosy townsfolk, mother-daughter friction.
And their neighbour Patrick (Brennan Campbell), a handsome but forlorn vet they keep tabs on, joins in. Not only has he been dumped by his fiancée at the altar (“no!” he amends, “I was still at the hotel”), but, worse, she’s getting married. To “a vegan butcher.” And worse still Patrick is actually going to the wedding; his date is the border collie over whom he has joint custody.
The keynote of Campbell’s performance is addled awkwardness that is charming, with a self-deprecating laugh, but ramped up to a level of intensity that makes you wonder if Patrick should consider a wee shot of the tranquillizers he gives to his equine patients.
Nikki Hulowski and Brennan Campbell in Where You Are, Shadow Theatre. Set and lighting Daniel vanHeyst, costumes Leona Brausen. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.
Anyhow, these are the prelims to a visit by Suzanna’s grown-up daughter Beth (Nikki Hulowski), a doctor in the city, that follows broad indicators hinting that mother and daughter don’t get along. “Just be nice. Don’t be pushy,” says Glenda to her sister. “Whatever you feel like saying … don’t.”
If Glenda and Suzanna have an unresolved dark secret (this is Canadian theatre, after all, built on unresolved dark secrets), Beth has one too. And her mom is relentless about unearthing it. “I didn’t know you even had a relationship status,” she says, aggrieved by the discovery that Beth has been withholding personal info about a fiancé, now -ex. How dare she? Hulowski is delightful as Beth, who’s funny and smart, and probably the sanest person in the play. This is the kind of play where “I don’t want to talk about it” is a prompt for whole scenes of talking about it. And Hulowski actually makes the artifices amusing, and seem downright impromptu.
Glenda and Suzanna are assisted materially (i.e. literally, with material) in their double-portraiture by Leona Brausen’s wonderful array of costumes. They’re more than apt, they’re actively fun to see, a visual comedy in themselves: the theatrical robes in which Suzanna is decked vs the genteel ruritanian Constable painting look of Glenda.
As the play folds and refolds along its familiar comedy crease lines (all captured in Darrin Hagen’s score), there are other costuming coups, too. In some ways you could argue that costuming actually is the storytelling. It’s certainly the source of the sight gags and narrative developments. Hmm, why does Beth arrive wearing khaki pants from the Gap, apparently so unlike her usual style of dress? “She’s dressed like she works in a car rental place,” sniffs Suzanna, on her bloodhound hunt for personal info. Why is the ‘little black dress’ so little?
You know a rom-com has been embedded in Where You Are when Beth emerges from the house in a skimpy nightdress and runs into Patrick, who’s taken his shirt off because it’s hot out and he’s been badgered, passive-aggressively into fixing the roof of the sisters’ deck.
Where You Are is nothing if not cannily constructed to be a comedy of the “I laughed; I cried” variety. It’s rather overtly determined to be heart-warming as well as funny. When things turn that corner of comedy, you realize you’ve been on a trail of clues that have planted on the route to play descriptives that lean into family, love, loss, grief, laughter and tears. I found it all a little assiduous and calculated. But I’m in the minority with these reservations, judging by the opening night audience. They loved it, and leapt to their feet in appreciation.
Having said that I must add that there’s fun to be had at this amiable show, beautifully produced. Da Silva is deft hand with comic lines. And Hudson’s cast, Cairns, Stewart, Hulowski and Campbell, are actors with comic chops who know how to make the most of them.
REVIEW
Where You Are
Theatre: Shadow Theatre
Written by: Kristen Da Silva
Directed by: John Hudson
Starring: Coralie Cairns, Davina Stewart, Nikki Hulowski, Brennan Campbell
Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.
Running: through May 18
Tickets: shadowtheatre.org
