Russell Hill
Written by Chris Earle
Directed by Chris Abraham
Starring Chris Earle, Shari Hollett, Frank Moore, Mary Francis Moore and Robert Smith
At Tarragon Theatre, Toronto
Rating: **½
Enter the main auditorium at the Tarragon Theatre these days and you'll be greeted by a startling sight. Designer John Thompson has transformed the stage into a note-perfect replica of a Toronto subway station, from the green tile walls to the bright yellow safety stripe along the edge of the platform. The hyper-realism is jolting; the play that follows is equally surprising but much less clear-headed about what it wants to portray.
This subway station is the setting for Russell Hill, a new script from actor and writer Chris Earle, inspired by the 1995 Toronto subway crash that killed three people and injured more than 100. (Passengers escaped from the tunnel north of Dupont Station through an emergency exit at Russell Hill, hence the title.) Dressed as a Toronto Transit Commission guard, Earle himself plays some kind of genial narrator, introducing us to the evening's action and reassuring us that our safety is his prime concern. There follows a tautly amusing scene on the subway platform in which Robert Smith plays a harried father anxiously trying to amuse a difficult child -- created with fabulous confidence by Earle's own young son, Sam -- while they wait for the train.
From there, we move to other vignettes. Now Smith is a cheerful businessman convinced that Frank Moore's laconic beggar is his lucky charm; now Moore is a man with a back problem seeking a massage from Mary Francis Moore's cool-headed healer. The scenes are all sharply performed by the cast, which also includes Earle's wife and artistic partner Shari Hollett, under the direction of a very slick Chris Abraham. And just as we start to wonder how this all ties together, Earle interrupts to explain that it doesn't, mocking our questions and exposing our insecurity in this confusing dramatic universe.
Insecurity is the point of Russell Hill, a play in which disparate, anxious scenes about fate and luck hint at the rupturing of Toronto's safeness, if they hint at anything at all. It's a point very effectively established by Abraham's stylish direction and Richard Feren's ominous sound design, but not one made particularly evocative by the episodic nature of the script. We continue to shift between scenes that increasingly feel like little more than sketch comedy, interrupted by Earle-the-narrator's reflections on public transit, which increasingly feel like little more than standup. In the show's weirdest moment, a tux-clad Frank Moore sings a Sinatra-like ode to Toronto, spoofing the New York, New York genre. After you recover from the stylistic shock, you'll recognize the message -- Toronto is small potatoes, and the three deaths are nothing compared to the earthquakes and ferry sinkings that plague other places -- but its ironic observation makes for pretty thin dramatic gruel.
Earle's background is in comedy. He and Hollett established their careers with those amusing pieces about parenthood ( Expectation and Big Head Goes to Bed), and in Earle's previous hit, Radio:30, he very effectively twisted the comic monologue into something more stylistically and thematically complex. Here, introducing multiple characters without benefit of a story that can contain them, his experimenting with the form never takes on a satisfying shape. Puzzling over this play after the fact, you can piece together its themes and coolly admire the idea behind the seeming disunity. In the moment, however, Earle's insistence on fleeting ironies in the place of sustaining narrative pushes an audience away.
Russell Hill continues at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre to May 25; 416-531-1827.
Kate Taylor