Credit: Don Lee
At The Vancouver Playhouse until January 12, 2019
Tickets from $19.99 at electriccompanytheatre.com
Posted January 10, 2019
Exposed to the scrutinizing light of the-day-after-opening-night, The Full Light of Day is still fabulous. It fires on all cylinders: a visual spectacle that combines live action on stage, projected images and fourteen live-streaming cameras that bring the performers up close and very, very personal. We see Mary (Gabrielle Rose), for example, lying in bed but a projection of her face fills the entire stage so we can see her fleeting thoughts and emotions. Or we see Mary’s husband Harold (Jim Mezon) ‘swimming’ in the lake but an overhead camera also shows him projected from above – stretched out on his back, facing the sky. The images are overlaid so we get a full, rich, multi-dimensional picture. A real car on stage moves through a projected urban landscape of glass and steel towers. Buildings appear to stream past.
Credit: Don Lee
While some shows can get bogged down by technology’s bells and whistles, The Full Light of Day offers layers upon layers of visuals that perfectly reflect the complexity of the characters and the situation in which they find themselves.
The play, written by Daniel Brooks and directed by Kim Collier for the Electric Company Theatre, is much more than a technical or visual extravaganza, however. It’s plot driven and it resonates on so many levels: family, greed, ambition, corruption, crime, guilt, disappointment, illness and dying. Amazingly, there’s also humour: when, for example, one of the characters is asked how she knew what to say to someone dying, she replied – without embarrassment – that she had Googled it.
In the play, Mary and Harold are rich. Mary has neither asked nor been told where the money comes from but Harold is involved in building downtown Toronto towers and he has bribed a few people – maybe even had a few people killed – in order to claw his way to the top. Deals have been made to circumvent building codes. People in high places have been involved. Scandal is imminent.
The couple has three adult children: David (Dean Paul Gibson) who has more or less taken over the family business and has even fewer scruples than his father; Jane (Jenny Young) also in real estate, is at odds with her mother; and Joey (Jonathon Young), is a sensitive dreamer, much loved by his mother. Mary feels her children are ‘broken’; she worries about where she went wrong.
Credit: Don Lee
An incident early in the play sends the action into an almost Biblical direction. Indeed, one of the characters refers once to Harold as Abraham. If you know your bible stories, you’ll know where The Full Light of Day is going. Director Collier, in her notes, refers to the play as a modern allegory.
The design team (Julie Fox, set; Michael Walton, lighting; Brian Johnson, projection; Brian Linds, sound; Peter Allen, original music; and Nancy Bryant, costumes) make The Full Light of Day constantly interesting. Walls move or rotate; a room is framed in; a leafy maple, rustling in the wind, fills five white scrims; lights come in from the sides, the front, overhead. Everything is perpetually in motion but smoothly, not hectically. It’s simply beautiful.
The performances are stellar. Gabrielle Rose brings a warm, delicate, maternal, almost Southern Belle quality to the role until her character Mary realizes she has not lived her life with any kind of awareness. During a casual drop-in to a small rural church she is reminded during a hallelujah-style sermon by the preacher about the wages of sin: “There is a great tragedy afoot in this land – we believe that all discomfort is unacceptable. A man cheats on his wife, steals from his partner, sells poison to children and missiles to tyrants, and then he goes to his doctor because he feels bad, his transgression makes him feel bad, he says “doctor I feel bad”, and what he isn’t told by his doctor is brother, you don’t feel bad enough.” It’s the pivotal monologue in The Full Light of Day and it shakes Mary to her core. When she finally cracks, you know it; there were cheers on opening night.
Credit: Don Lee
Jim Mezon, as Harold, does not endear Harold to us nor is he meant to until the final curtain. Harold may be tough in business but he’s as needy of Mary’s affection as a child and he patronizes her mercilessly. A Doll’s House comes to mind. Dean Paul Gibson’s David is loud, vulgar and coarse while Jonathon Young’s Joey is heartbreakingly fragmented and lost.
Jillian Fargey, as David’s wife Sherry, is marvellous in the deathbed scene but her character is in many ways as calculating as David and father-in-law Harold. Sherry lives well, has a beautiful home, a nannie and a housekeeper; she does not see herself as a victim of her hard-drinking, gross husband. A trade-off has been made and she’s living with it.
Credit: Don Lee
Rounding out the cast are Vanessa Chen as David and Sherry’s daughter Lorna and Henry Bolan as their son Jake plus an ensemble of four in various roles: Nita Bowerman, Carlen Escarraga, William Ford Hopkins and Stephanie Wong.
The Full Light of Day is a brilliant new Canadian play, presented by the Electric Company Theatre (in association with the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity, and BMO) and now making its world premiere on stage at the Vancouver Playhouse. It feels like a joyful homecoming and a great ushering in of the 2019 season.