A long night in the dark

The Assumption of Empire weaves in
and out of the past but has trouble
leaving its mark on the now

NOT SO HAPPY FAMILIES:
Laura Mitchell, Alice Abracen and Bill Croft

By NEIL BOYCE

Laura Mitchell and Paul Hawkins’ theatre company Unwashed Grape works on a philosophy that, in theory, sounds great: get a new play up on its feet fast, cheaply and without workshopping it to death. With Ann Lambert’s new work The Assumption of Empire, now on at MainLine, it’s put to the test.

The Montreal playwright’s lengthy-feeling two-act is about the life and loves of Jewish, political, lefty-liberal journalist Sophie Wiseman (in an energetic performance from Mitchell). Sophie’s the type who names the family dog Ortega and reads the obituaries for entertainment (wondering why at least one of those listed can’t die unheroically).

Episodic scenes flash forward and back in the piece throughout pivotal periods in Sophie’s life from 1979 to 2006: an early romance and brief marriage to her university history professor; their encounter nearly 10 years later after the death of his second wife; and a further rekindling of their affair set more or less in the present, when Sophie’s daughter is in her teens.

Actors write episode titles on an immense blackboard at the back of the stage (“Empty Nest,” “Kruschev,” “MILF”) to introduce each segment. Hawkins directs the jumbled chronology nimbly: quick blackouts between frequent shifts in time means actors have to move fast, putting on a blazer or biker jacket as they jump decades.

Sophie’s punctuated romance with the brainy Ivan—half-Polish son of a Ukrainian nationalist—has the most genuine feel (“Like sleeping with a Cossack,” she says). Tim Hine pours his heart into the role of the older and charming Eastern European, a fatherly lover and a teacher of classes like “Cold War Geopolitics and the Assumption of Empire.”

Husband Steve (Bill Croft), meanwhile, is the solid and affable guy who has to put up with Sophie’s shit. “Do you think I’m still pretty?” she says, then rebuking his answer of “I still think you’re pretty” as not exactly what was asked. Why he’s endured the mismatched marriage for so long is a mystery we never uncover.

Karmic payback arrives in the form of her offspring, the sassy and resentful Eliot (in a nice turn from Lambert’s own daughter Alice Abracen), and a moment of clarity at the end as Sophie ponders, “How do we know that anything we do amounts to anything? ...One empire rises and another falls.”

The actors acquit themselves well with the material at hand, but scarcely a moment rings true in this belaboured family saga, a dramatic romance cast against the fateful backdrop of history.

It’s all about the script. Wedged into a romantic interlude or a family spat, topics like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the end of the dictatorship in Iran hit the stage with a thud under dishwater-dull writing in a story that reads like Dr. Zhivago-lite.

I know, it’s not fair. Woody Allen and Neil Simon are the Plato and Aristotle of comedy-drama. Everything in the genre since then seems a footnote. Here, Sophie and Tim stretch out the ingénue and teacher scenes from Hannah and Her Sisters into a full-length drama (Hine in particular looks and sounds like a crusty old Max Von Sydow).

But mere jokey dialogue and historically referential catchphrases do not a gripping story make. And without it, we’re just a bunch of people sitting in the dark.

THE ASSUMPTION OF EMPIRE TO
MARCH 22 AT MAINLINE (3997
ST-LAURENT) TICKETS: (514) 849-3378