Rosemary Dunsmore (left) and Cathy Murphy in a scene from The New Electric Ballroom.
The New Electric Ballroom
- Written by Enda Walsh
- Directed by Autumn Smith
- Starring Rosemary Dunsmore and Sarah Dodd
- At the Tarragon Theatre Extra Space in Toronto
Who's holding who hostage in The New Electric Ballroom?
Enda Walsh's latest play about a hermetically sealed Irish family concerns three shut-in sisters living in a small coastal town. The oldest two - Breda (Rosemary Dunsmore) and Clara (Sarah Dodd) - haven't left the house in decades; they stick to their living room where they play a depressing parlour game that involves pulling topics out of a bowl and then extemporizing about the loneliness of existence.
The much younger Ada (Cathy Murphy) gets out to work at the local cannery, but she may be the most curdled of all, nearly 40 years old and never been kissed. "No one but me and the sea being tinned," she says sadly.
When all the sisters are at home together, they repeatedly re-enact a story about a disastrous night out at the New Electric Ballroom. Breda and Clara went to the dance hall some 40 years earlier to hear a crooner named Roller Doyle. What happened in his dressing room afterward is what has convinced them to close themselves away from the world ever since.
The only gentleman caller the sisters get these days is the awkward, chatty Patsy (Christopher Stanton), who delivers fish and keeps waiting to be invited in for tea. Though she has been brought up to disdain love by her sisters, Ada is beginning to wonder if perhaps she should take a chance on change and Patsy. But salvation isn't so easy and Patsy has his own limitations that, as it turns out, are also related to a certain night at the New Electric Ballroom.
In Autumn Smith's production for MacKenzieRo (which has previously brought Toronto Walsh's Bedbound and Disco Pigs), Dunsmore and Dodd give two exciting performances as Breda and Clara. Dunsmore is taut and fierce throughout, while Dodd s loose and loopy, and they both have great fun with Walsh's dense, delicious and often very funny language. ("Mother said I had a gift for coffee cake the way Jesus had a gift for sacrifice," Clara says with pride, though the exact extent of her culinary talents are later called into question.)
Smith paints pretty pictures with her cast on Lindsay Anne Black's set, which is mostly kitchen-sink naturalism with hints of apocalypse peeking through the front door. There is a problem with sightlines, though - and characters disappear into a chair placed too far downstage for long stretches of the play.
Walsh, one of Ireland's hottest contemporary playwrights, keeps returning to these reclusive families who ritually re-enact life instead of living it (perhaps a sour metaphor for the theatre). His settings keep getting bigger - Bedbound took place on a bed and The Walworth Farce took place in an apartment, while the sisters of The New Electric Ballroom have a whole house to themselves - but his characters are becoming more claustrophobic. Here all the characters are worried about streets getting narrower and houses closing in on them.
Toronto's most recent exposure to Walsh was The Walworth Farce, in a visiting production of from Ireland's Druid Theatre. The New Electric Ballroom, in Smith's Canadian premiere for MacKenzieRo, suffers a bit in comparison in terms of both play and production.
Neither one is realistic, but at least the frenetically stylized Walworth Farce had a certain internal plausibility - it made sense on its own terms.
The traumatic event that led Breda and Clara to not just leave the company of men, but the entirety of mankind, however, doesn't actually seem all that traumatizing once it is revealed. This leaves you searching for other deeper explanations that never materialize. (Though the huge gap in age between Ada and her sisters may suggest something sinister.)
Walsh also shows his thematic cards too soon this time around. Breda begins the play, back to the audience, reciting a rapid-fire speech that gives the general rundown of what Walsh's play (and the work of fellow Irish Samuel Beckett) is about: the "terrible necessity" of talk and the impossible desire to return the warmth and the noise of womb.
With characters who have this much self-awareness, the emotional force of the situation is lost. And so who is holding the sisters hostage here? Unfortunately, the answer I took away from this production wasn't Breda or Ada, but the playwright Enda Walsh and his own theatrical compulsion to repeat.
The New Electric Ballroom continues at the Tarragon Theatre Extra Space to Oct. 24.