Sunday, September 16, 2007

THEATRE REVIEW
THE BUSY WORLD IS HUSHED
Theatre: Northern Light
Directed by: Skye Brandon
Starring: Holly Turner, Trevor Schmidt, Farren Timoteo
Where: The Third Space,
11516 103rd St.
Running: Through Sept. 30
Tickets: 471-1586 or Tix on the Square (420-1757)


EDMONTON - The Busy World Is Hushed, opening the Northern Light Theatre season, is named for an Episcopalian prayer with a soothing perspective on death as the peace that comes when "the fever of life is over."

The questing spirit of this play, by the New York author of The Credeaux Canvas, is anything but soothing, however.

For one thing, as you'll see in Skye Brandon's directorial debut, it's populated by smart, skeptical, mouthy people who are not only shaken by the fever of life, but feverish with doubt.

And that even includes the devout minister/biblical scholar Hannah (Holly Turner), a widow for the decades since her husband's probable suicide, who says of her faith that it's "my life's work."

The genesis (so to speak) is a job interview. Hannah hires troubled, lonely Brandt (Trevor Schmidt) to ghost a book about a newly discovered Coptic gospel.

At her instigation, the long-lapsed Brandt, stalled in his own writing and traumatized by his dad's cruelly ongoing death, becomes romantically involved with Hannah's wayward, self-destructive son Thomas (Farren Timoteo). The latter, who ricochets from place to place, career to career, is pursuing research of his own, into his dad's mysterious exit.

There it is, a tangled knot of questions about religion, suffering, faith, biblical texts, love. Answers aren't what this very sad play is about, and thank, er, What- or Whoever for that.

If we were left with theological arguments, whether about Scripture or why God created a world full of pain --
and sometimes we are, despite Brandon's best efforts and occasionally because of them -- we'd feel stranded on that distant shore where there's no theatre.

As it is, we're with characters. They're in a doomed love triangle of sorts. And they're struggling to find meaning in lives full of pain, death, loneliness and sorrow, which, they think, might well say something about the Creator, whether he's to be found in human relationships or not at all.

In a convincingly cluttered makeshift library (designer: Schmidt) infused with homey, warm light (designer: Roy Jackson), Brandon's actors commit with intensity.

The characters find each other intriguing, maddening, and occasionally tiring. And so do we.

Turner, newly returned to Edmonton theatre, brings a likeable cordiality and probing energy to Hannah, who is redeemed for us by the way she has to keep rediscovering her beliefs, under fire (she says that's why she likes to hire agnostic assistants).

No one can accuse NLT's artistic director, in this rare stage appearance, of grandstanding with the playwright's wit. There has never been a sadder, bleaker wiseacre than Brandt, who is an uncomfortable, and discomforting, combination of morose and anxious in a performance that consistently plays against -- squelches, even -- the snappy rejoinders the script gives him. As Schmidt reminds us, perhaps a little insistently on occasion, Brandt is bogged down in his life, and wary. When he rises to fury in heartbreak, you feel like cheering.

Timoteo brings an attractive exasperation and restless energy to proceedings as the son who insists on living day to day, and feels cheated by what he sees as his mother's retreat into Jesus-land.

It's a bit schematic, perhaps. But the absorbing thing about the play (and the complex rhythms of the production) is that it doesn't sell any of these questers short.

lnicholls@thejournal.canwest.com