Head space

>> Fallen Angel’s A Lie of the Mind is
meandering but worthwhile

LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD:
Brad Carmichael and Jessica Rose

by NEIL BOYCE

It starts off raw. Sam Shepard begins his play A Lie of the Mind with a man thinking he has beaten his wife to death and fleeing to his childhood home in California. The woman, meanwhile, recovers with her family in Montana. From there, the story rolls onward like a metaphysical tumbleweed, becoming more confounding and surreal as it gathers speed.

For the current Fallen Angel Production at MainLine Theatre, director Frances Balenzano began with two terrific choices of casting in Brad Carmichael and Jessica Rose as the embittered leads Jake and Beth.

The theme of memory looms large. Jake, frantic and raging, soon claims he can’t recall what he’s done. Beth, whose face we first see wrapped up like a mummy, can only speak in fragments, although her halting utterances nail the truth about the people around her—families it would be charitable to call dysfunctional.

It’s a complex and rewarding play, Shepard’s summation of his writing on “the family,” and the idea of brokenness in American life. Set in a bewildering environment of two homes surrounded on stage by darkness, the characters’ real histories get confused with their self-delusions, and the mood, neither real nor fake, drifts constantly between the two.

“Pretend is more better... because it fills me,” Beth says of her life. “Ordinary is no good. Ordinary is empty.”

The production requires a split stage as the story shifts across the miles and between the families. Here they make the added division of an awkward set splitting the audience between two ends of a busy stage—you pick your seat on either side of the performance and hope for the best. At the farthest reaches of the stage, you’ll have to crane to make out the action and sometimes contend with the backs of actors.

It’s a messy and often meandering production, but the material and lead actors make it worthwhile.

Theatre notes

• The New Words Festival at Monument-National (April 23–May 3) brings a quirky twin production from Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman with two inter-connected plays from the point of view of different characters. JOHN … sudden death looks at the last night in the life of hockey legend John Kordic. It runs in rotation with CINDY … a perfect circle, a fictionalized look at the life of one of Kordic’s girlfriends, a stripper in a Montreal nightclub. At Studio of the Monument-National (1182 St-Laurent) until May 3 (514) 871-2224.

• Performance artist Nathalie Derome celebrates her 20th year in business with a CD launch and show called Les temps qui courent, part of the Vasistas festival, and the latest from this consistently interesting independent artist and musician. Tonight, April 24, 8 p.m. at Théâtre LaChapelle, (3700 St-Dominique), (514) 843-7738.

• Shakespeare gets reimagined in a modern Haitian setting in Stacey Christodoulou’s workshop production of Macbeth, performed in French and Creole—it depicts the rise and fall of an ambitious soldier turned tyrant. Tonight, April 24, 8:30 p.m. at the Segal Centre Studio (5170 Côte Ste-Catherine), (514) 739-7944.

A Lie of the Mind, until April 27
at Mainline Theatre (3997
St-Laurent), 8 p.m., Saturday
matinee April 26 at 2 p.m.
Tickets: (514) 489-0271,
www.fallenangelproductions.ca