AGE OF AROUSAL
Directed by Maja Ardal
Written by Linda Griffiths
Starring Clare Coulter, Sarah Dodd, Gemma James-Smith
At the Factory Theatre in Toronto until Dec. 16 (416-504-9971)
***
I don't know how good Linda Griffiths is with money, but I'm here to tell you that she can squeeze a lifetime of goods out of a loonie. Even back in the day when the current darling of currencies was worth 65 cents to the greenback, the Toronto playwright and actor got more than she bargained for when she forked out a loonie for a second-hand copy of George Gissing's Victorian novel The Odd Women.
Seven years and multiple drafts later, a new play called Age of Arousal, "wildly inspired" by the 1892 novel, received its world premiere in Calgary last February to ecstatic reviews. Word got out to Philadelphia, where a new production begins next month. Before that, Toronto gets to see it at the Factory Theatre, where it opened Friday, albeit in a sullied and unevenly performed production from Nightwood Theatre's interim artistic director, Maja Ardal. A scholarly edition of the text has also just been published, featuring meticulous production notes as well as 30 pages from Griffiths on the social and political conditions of Victorian women under headings as eclectic as "Sapphic Victorians" and "Peace and War." Any more squeezing and that loonie would turn into pâté de foie gras.
But it's the intellectual investment Griffiths has made in the original that is striking. In turning Gissing's obscure story about women whose lives are caught in the social turmoil of late-19th-century England into a play, Griffiths has widened its parameters to include past and present, Britain and Canada, speaking to the same experience from two different centuries and cultural contexts. Anachronisms may abound, but so do insights.
This is not the only odd coupling that Griffiths makes out of The Odd Women. (The title refers to single women who "will never be paired.") Age of Arousal synthesizes the male and prurient authorial voice of Gissing with Griffiths's own unabashedly feminist and compassionate perspective. His heavy novel's weight is replaced with a breezier dramatic mode that allows her characters to articulate what his could only insinuate.
Nowhere is this more evident than when Griffiths foregrounds her women's same-sex desires. Give or take a few corsets, some fainting spells and a medical authority who believes that child-bearing can be negatively affected by too much thinking, this is The L Word seamlessly transplanted to the world of the suffragettes.
The mother superior of lesbianism in Age of Arousal is Mary Barfoot (Clare Coulter), a former political prisoner who runs a home school for training secretaries, giving women more control of their careers and finances. Her protégé and lover is Rhoda Nunn (Sarah Dodd), a "ferociously odd" woman. Into their lives come three economically destitute sisters: Virginia (Ellen-Ray Hennessy) and Alice (Maggie Huculak), who are both what the Victorians would call spinsters, and Monica (Gemma James-Smith), the younger sibling easily identified as a vixen. The strength of Griffiths's re-creation of these women's lives lies in the absorbing political details and her juggling the comic with, if not the tragic, then the theatrically melodramatic.
Ardal, however, is more overwhelmed than inspired by this slippery, genre-defying material. The production settles for pushing the play solely into the comic, replacing whimsy with cheap laughter and missing the work's deeper emotional existence. The show is also maddeningly inconsistent in its look. Julia Tribe provides some gorgeous costumes for the women, neatly placing each within the economic and emotional register of her character, but her set must be one of the most hideous of any major production in recent memory.
The same inconsistency spills over to performances, with only Dodd and James-Smith at home with the play's jumps between naturalism and flirtatious theatricality. The rest of the cast - including Dylan Smith as the solo male character - deliver performances that the more euphemistically inclined may call "idiosyncratic" (translation: awful). Coulter and Hennessy, in particular, are physically onstage but psychically out of it. The opening-night crowd seemed to egg them on, laughing at their every word and wave of a handkerchief to the point where the evening felt like a Christmas panto for the feminist set. "These characters are real and must be played for real," Griffiths says in her notes. Real is one thing they aren't in this production.
That Age of Arousal still fascinates despite its production problems (hence the three stars) is a credit to Griffiths's absorbing intellectual work. I can't wait to see this at the Shaw Festival or in the hands of a cast and director who can rise to the challenge of real and fictional women living in the Age of Arousal.