Digging for Gould

>> Centaur's Glenn is an alienating experience

by AMY BARRATT

At the opening of David Young's Glenn last week, I finally understood what's been going on at the Centaur for the last two years. Ever since Michel Tremblay's For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again premiered there in September of '98, the artistic director has been unable to think of anything but that play (which spent much of last season on a Canadian tour) and the company has been running on automatic pilot.

Just compare the media blitz surrounding the Washington opening of For the Pleasure a couple of weeks ago with the virtual silence surrounding Glenn, this year's season opener. The company appears to have accepted in advance that its subscribers wouldn't "get" Glenn. But they're banking that a name like R. H. Thomson in the cast will keep a certain percentage of theatregoers--like the couple behind me cooing, "Ooh, he's good," when the houselights had barely dimmed--happy. And what more can you hope for?

You can hope that a company chooses a play because it believes in the work and wants to share a theatrical experience with you. Instead, Centaur's Glenn (in co-production with Toronto's Necessary Angel Theatre Company) seems engineered to make us feel ignorant and alienated. Someone with an extensive knowledge of Gould's life and work would probably get a lot out of it, but that person is not the average viewer. So, as a production company, do you just write off the vast majority of us who are not Gould scholars, while simultaneously patting yourself on the back for raising the intellectual bar? That's one approach, but those who choose it are insulting the playwright and the work as much as they are the public.

For there are simple things a Centaur with its mind on its game might have done to make Glenn more accessible to the general public. A short bio of Gould in the program would have been a great help in navigating through the play's complex structure.

If you go, it might help you to know right off the bat that the four actors on stage are all portraying Gould, at different stages of his life. It

wouldn't hurt to know that Gould was born in 1932 and died days after his 50th birthday in 1982. Also, so you don't spend two hours wondering about it, I can tell you that the invisible "Jesse" all four of them address throughout the play was a cousin and confidante of Gould.

For this production, director Richard Rose has made some weird choices. You'd be hard pressed to find four white men who look and sound more different than Brandon McGibbon (the Prodigy), Duncan Ollerenshaw (the Performer), John Koensgen (the Perfectionist) and R.H. Thomson (the Puritan). It's probably too literal-minded of me to wish for four actors who look a little bit alike, and maybe even vaguely resemble Gould himself; but surely it would have made sense for all four to cultivate similar mannerisms.

I enjoyed the flamboyant intensity of McGibbon as the youngest Gould, some of which was picked up by Ollerenshaw. But Koensgen is more credible as a taxi driver than a musician and he's too old for the role he's playing. Thomson, in addition to sounding, as he always does, like a hoser, incomprehensibly also makes the not-quite 50-year-old Gould seem like a foot-dragging duffer.

For those wishing to know more about Gould, this production might whet your appetite, but renting 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould or reading a good biography would be a lot more satisfying. :

Glenn, to Oct. 22 at Centaur Theatre, Tuesday-Saturday, 8pm, $20-32, 288-3161