Theatrical Commandment No. 1: Thou shalt not bore your audience

Dean Gilmour and Walter Borden in "Name in Vain (Decalogue Two)" at Tarragon Theatre

If Name in Vain (Decalogue Two) is to be remembered for anything beyond its hubris, it may be for inspiring a fresh simile to describe boredom and replace that old cliché about paint drying. From now on, we can say that an extremely dull night at the theatre was "like watching monks garden."

Critic and novelist André Alexis's nearly wordless play – in which an audience can observe five silent brothers with personalities as complex as the seven dwarfs tend to a potato patch for 70 minutes – is the first of an envisioned 10 dealing with the Commandments.

That's an ambitious and not obviously awful idea on paper, even if it would be hard to top Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's widely acclaimed series of films that did the same.

But, as it turns out, Alexis is not actually interested in interrogating the rules God jotted down on stone tablets a few millennia ago. As he explains in a program note, his Decalogue is – brace yourself – about "using the Ten Commandments to examine theatre."

To this end, the aspiring experimentalist has scribbled out two lists of his own: one of things he believes are fundamental to theatre (voice, movement, lighting, sound), and another of what he considers theatrical genres (farce, two-handers, puppet theatre, musical). "And with very little trouble, I bound some aspect of theatre to its own commandment," he explains.

If this sounds like a terrible, overly intellectualized starting point for writing a play, let alone 10, the proof is in the pudding that is Name in Vain. I find it difficult to believe that Tarragon Theatre head honcho Richard Rose not only programmed this, but chose to direct it himself.

For this first play concerning the Commandment about blaspheming, Alexis decided to give himself the challenge – "somewhat perverse," he boasts, apparently unaware of the existence of dance, movement theatre or mime – of writing a play without words.

He's found an unimaginatively literal way of meeting this goal, setting Name in Vain in a monastery where five monks have taken a vow not to speak and spend most of their time in a potato field. The quintet of characters haven't any names listed, so I will christen them with ones in the following plot summary.

Dopey (Dean Gilmour) keeps getting distracted by birds in the trees and stepping on the row of plants maintained by Grumpy (Eric Goulem).

Doc (Richard McMillan) tries to calm their conflict with wise, paternal gazes, while Bashful (Sergio Di Zio) generally averts his eyes from any conflict.

Happy (Walter Borden) smiles a lot.

Despite the fact that only three syllables are ever spoken in it – and you can probably guess who speaks them – Name in Vain is a noisy play thanks to John Gzowski's sound design of birds and bugs and all the unnecessary hammering of nails into planks by the monks. (Rose's direction is a strange mix of imitated and actual action, mimed potatoes and real ones.) Alexis may believe he is pushing the boundaries of theatre, but he is only mildly subverting a very antiquated notion of what a play is. What he's done is written a starchy exercise in naturalism, with a simplistic and poorly structured plot that takes ages to go nowhere.

I'm content to simply imagine Alexis's planned "experiment in costume design" concerning keeping the Sabbath holy and the "experiment in lighting" about not murdering. (I am not, believe it or not, making those up.) Three cheers for the cast for giving it all, but let's stop this vanity project here.

Name in Vain (Decalogue Two) runs until Oct. 30.

Name in Vain (Decalogue Two)