Still

Do not expect naturalism.  In another remarkable flight of imagination, playwright Jen Silverman (Wink, The Moors) puts on stage not just a grieving mother but also her two days dead stillborn, the guilty mid-wife, and a bitter, misanthropic teenage dominatrix.  There is no natural cause and effect here – except for the characters’ emotions.  The story is ‘absurd’, but Ms Silverman’s purpose is to explore what is under or behind the natural, that is so often presented as ‘naturalism’ – and make us question it. 

Her bold choices could seem merely arbitrary – or even perverse – but they reverberate like the best poetry.  Why is Morgan, the mother, an entomologist?  Would a guilt-stricken midwife really go to a dominatrix – a teenage dominatrix?  Can a dead baby intervene is people’s lives?  In a recent interview, on ABC RN’s ‘Stage Show’, Ms Silverman said that a central question for her is ‘Can people change?’  Here, through a series of extreme if ‘impossible’ events and encounters, she again asks that very question.

Morgan (Joanne Booth), a childless, forty-one-year-old professor of entomology, became unexpectedly pregnant – something that, up to that point, she had never wanted.  She made a huge decision: to love this baby with all her being.  She chose a home birth - and her baby was stillborn.  The midwife, Elena (Elisa Armstrong) blames herself and, stricken with failure, a conviction that she is a ‘bad person’, and a desire to be punished, seeks out a dominatrix, Dolores (Sara Bolch).  But Constantinople (Joseph Lai), the lost stillborn cast aside, never held by his mother, near naked and dripping with amniotic fluid, can hear her crying and desperately searches for her…

As the dominatrix, Sara Bolch is a spikey, whippet thin mean girl, but one whose tough talk and cruel abuse is somehow just that little bit forced.  Ms Bolch executes a fine trajectory here: her changes, her actions, are ‘unbelievable’ but completely credible.  Elisa Armstrong’s midwife is strong and touching – a good person who figures that if she really is a ‘bad person’, that’s what she’ll be.  Elena’s goodness is one of the strongest sources of humour in the play.  Within this ensemble, Joanne Booth, rather puzzlingly, appears to’ve opted or been directed to play her Morgan on one note, and not finding the humour in the ‘dark moments’ that Ms Silverman asks for.  Overall, perhaps a lighter touch is needed here; there is a certain solemnity to this production (and its ‘serious’ subject) which makes it at times seem a little more drawn out than it need be.

But how easily we accept Constantinople in this marvellous performance by the tall and beautiful Joseph Lai.  His two-days-dead baby knows only what he’s heard in the womb.  Now he learns – he’s eager to learn - as he searches, and the most powerful element of his new knowledge is anger – a compressed and sad metaphor for a human life, enacted by a ‘dead’ but feeling baby.  Mr Lai makes this lost figure both touching and funny in his naiveté and his yearning.  

Director Sarah Vickery and designer Bethany J Fellows eschew set dressing and some stipulated furniture (e.g., a pool table!).  The fortyfivedownstairs space has no wings and the cast remain on a central stage throughout.  If not in a scene, they stand motionless at one or other corner in postures of suspension, martyrdom, or despair – which also suggests that each is inextricably part of the story, present or not.  Aided by Gabriel Bethune’s expressive lighting, the result is that one scene segues – or melts smoothly - into the next.  Ms Silverman stipulates no interval – and once we suspend our logical preconceptions, we are (quickly) immersed in this strange narrative, carried along by the emotions – ‘illogical’ or metaphorical as they are – and evoking strong emotional responses in us.  

Still – so much meaning in that title – is a confronting experience; it is certainly in the ‘absurd’ tradition, but here imbued with as much tenderness as the bizarre or contradictory.  An exciting evening in the theatre.  See it.

Michael Brindley

Images (from top): Elisa Armstrong and Joanne Booth; Elisa Armstrong; Sara Bolch & Joanne Booth. Photographer: Angel Leggas