CHERISH
Theatre: Northern Light
Directed by: Trevor Schmidt
Starring: Nadien Chu, Sue Huff, Brad Loucks, Richard Meen
Where: The Third Space, 11516 103rd St.
Running: Through Sunday
Tickets: 471-1586 or Tix on the Square (420-1757)
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EDMONTON - Nearly everything about Cherish, getting its Canadian premiere at Northern Light Theatre, is a surprise. And that includes (a) its very existence, since Ken Duncum, evidently one of New Zealand's leading playwrights, isn't a name that rings bells here, yet. And (b) the fact that Cherish starts complicated and gets simpler, instead of the other way around.

Along the way, during Trevor Schmidt's production, our expectations are continually foiled, exciting in the theatre. We meet two same-sex couples -- one gay, one lesbian. They're a quartet of friends, and an extended family, in more than social ways. Jesse (Nadien Chu) and Maeve (Sue Huff) each have a daughter fathered by Tom (Richard Meen). And, on the understanding that Tom and his partner William (Brad Loucks), a middle-aged contract lawyer, will get their turn to be parents, too, Jesse is pregnant again, by Tom.

Ahah! you think: the very essence of the contemporary/modern family, the notion that finding your family is a creative act in the new age. The little ripple of tension in Maeve created by the affection, and the physical ease, between Jesse and Tom, who's no mere sperm bank on legs, only adds to the sense that human connections run deeper than gender.
But that's not it. The knot of the play, unravelled and re-tied during an absorbing evening, is that Jesse, congenitally a line-of-least-resistance type who wants to be liked -- interestingly, she's an artist -- finds herself unable to give the baby up. The repercussions of this unfairness, on all characters and all relationships in Cherish, are profound -- and utterly resistant to the normal digestive juices of drama, which tends to favour the unstable but resolvable human geometry of the love triangle over, say, the love rectangle or polygon. By the end you'll understand, in a way that's both harsh and beautiful, why Duncum calls his play Cherish and not Love.

Like Craig Wright's Orange Flower Water earlier this season, Cherish is an ensemble piece through and through, remarkable, even disconcerting, for its even-handedness with characters you thought might be relegated to the minors, morally or dramatically.

William the lawyer, for example, turns out to have less faith in the law than anyone in the play. It's the lawyer who has a certain sad worldliness, a largesse of understanding. You can't always get what you want, he tells the furious Tom, who's all for suing.

"The things you can't have -- they define you, shape you. They belong to you. ... They're something to be cherished."
This is a long preamble to Schmidt's production, which unfolds (and that is the word) in his own beautiful design, with its lovely visual hint of life poised on the threshhold between the domestic and a galaxy of translucent planets. Both the music and the projections (of "family photos") are heavy-handed. The former, used to segue scenes, seems excessive. The latter, though, in repeated applications as the characters watch silently, effectively crack open a whole orbit of precious, torturing possibilities.

At the centre of a production in which the women are more convincing than the men, is a performance of such compelling, fierce, even ugly, force by Huff that you'll be knocked back in your seat. Maeve is the spikey, unpleasant one, who lives, forever vigilant, on the spectrum that goes from unease to outright hostility. In her, the parenting instinct is a dark bloom in a war zone. You believe her through and through.

No other performances match it, in truth. But Chu is brave about conveying the shifty, unforthright qualities of the appealing Jesse. Meen captures something of the puckish, gamin-like qualities of Tom. And Loucks's William, stiff as a corporate board, does convey something of a man trapped in his own stoicism.

It's the image of Maeve, lashed by her ferocious cherishing and her own independent spirit, that will attach itself to you. A play, like many at NLT, to be discussed.