by Marsha Norman
Directed by Alisa Palmer
A Soulpepper Production
at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts
May 20-June 21, 2008

   The greatest mother-daughter acting team in the history of Canadian theatre is currently giving audiences a breathtaking lesson in acting genius. Dawn Greenhalgh and Megan Follows make no bid for cheap sympathy or claptrap histrionics as they play Thelma and Jessie, humdrum mother and daughter who are deeply bruised by loneliness and the lack of love in Marsha Norman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning two-hander, one of the most disturbing American plays of the last two and a half decades. Superficially, the actresses would seem to be miscast. Playing a talkative “plain country woman” from somewhere in the new South, Ms. Greenhalgh never does successfully hide her British accent, even though she sometimes manages a flat tone with the hint of Southern twang. Ms. Follows is hardly an actress one would call anonymous or drab. She has too much innate grace to be a lumpy drab, but her Jessie, who coolly announces her determination to commit suicide, and Ms. Greenhalgh’s Thelma, who cajoles, pleads with her daughter, and throws a temper tantrum before breaking down, become locked in a taut, wrenching struggle that makes this 90-minute drama seem cathartic.

   Marsha Norman has deliberately set herself difficulties in this story. She avoids sentimentality—though not always melodramatic contrivances—and she deploys two characters with barren lives, placing them in an unappealing setting and giving them humdrum physical business (filling candy jars, tidying up the kitchen, crocheting, changing the slipcover of a sofa, making hot chocolate) while setting them on a tightrope between love and desolation, chatter and loneliness, life and death. Ms. Follows’ Jessie, though not lumpy or utterly dull in personality, effectively conveys a woman at the end of her tether, and she does this without fuss and without raising her voice, except for those spasms of anger or bitterness that seem totally justified given the hurt and misunderstanding in her life. Having lost her father, a marriage, and a son to delinquency, she busies herself settling her mother’s home after coolly asking for her father’s handgun: “The gun is for me. I’m going to kill myself.” Ms. Greenhalgh, of course, protests that the gun cannot be used and certainly not in her home. “I’m tired, I’m hurt, I feel sad,” explains Jessie, adding that she’s had enough. She has never been able to hold a job, has suffered a bad fall from a horse, is actually epileptic, and her life has never amounted to much. “Whoever promised you a good time?” challenges her mother, refusing to acknowledge that the daughter’s real desolation. Ms. Follows incarnates this desolation in a performance that is understated magic. Some critics complain that she is too beautiful to be credible as Norman’s existential loser—as if physical beauty were somehow an immunity against suicide or a death wish. Her baggy trousers and sheenless hair only provide the plain surface. Her face looks composed, almost detached from the awesomeness of her ultimate purpose. But the face and calm talk merely mask her relentless inner despair that this actress makes heartbreakingly real. “This is how I have my say. I can get off the bus…it’s my stop whenever I like,” she says with calm determination, adding: “I’m somebody I waited for who never came and never will.”

   Ms. Follows has such restraint that when she does cut loose with passion, she magnifies the power. She is fortunate to have her own mother acting opposite her because Ms. Greenhalgh delivers the most poignant, funny, unsettling readings that turn this play into an absorbing, terrifying struggle. Physically, she has more to do in stage business with needles and crochet, slipcovers and cocoa, gossip and wrestling with her daughter near the fateful end. However, emotionally, she is no less active, registering the mother’s enforced cheer, fear, desperation, self-pity, rage, and primal grief. Indeed, her performance is the perfect counter to Ms. Follows’ amazing acting. When Ms. Greenhalgh cries: “How could I know you were so alone?” after the dreaded gunshot that ends her daughter’s life, the moment has all the power of Greek tragedy. The mother-daughter duo also suggests the power of Tennessee Williams and Henrik Ibsen combined, but without seeming exotic, self-consciously poetic, or fraught with abstract symbolism.

   Alisa Palmer’s direction never gets in the way of the two actresses, which may seem like faint praise, but isn’t because a good director knows when to trust a performer’s instincts and sensitivity. Ken MacDonald’s set has plastic wood paneling and ugly flowered slipcovers—very right for this bleak story, and Judith Bowden’s costumes are appropriately drab or in low taste. Attention is never deflected from the two actresses who plumb the depths of an intensely complicated relationship whose base is perplexed, imperfect love. 

photos: Sandy Nicholson


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