Shades of Heaven
Very Heaven
by Ann Lambert
Centaur Theatre
Montreal playwright Ann Lambert's got a gem of a new play, Very Heaven, running now at Centaur. The nervous energy and jitters of opening night helped make for a wild ride in this story of three sisters reunited in their rural family home after the drowning death of their mother. What impressed most was Lambert's accomplishment in weaving a moving and compelling, well planned story, and in director Eda Holmes' skill in carefully playing out the dense material. The audience hangs on not so much for the moments of revelation (of which there are many), but because they're caught up in the story, and have to find out how it ends.
The sisters meet to fulfill a wish of their mother Rose and scatter her ashes in the lake, but the old home and surrounding village are filled with fragments of a puzzle: who was the mother they thought they knew, and what became of the father who walked out years before? Answers for the Leary sisters get convoluted after discovering their mother Rose's diary, and with the appearance of handyman François "Stretch" Lachance (in a tender, moving performance by Gérald Gagnon) - there to build a gazebo the mother had earlier commissioned.
Sensible, married, conventional Harriet Leary (played by Jude Beny), the eldest sister, is first to arrive at her mother's home after the funeral. She fusses about the place, carrying the urn of her mother's ashes, panicked that everything proceed just right.
Juliet (Mary Harvey) breezes in next - she's a drinker, out of control, her life teetering after a bad marriage and money worries. She wants nothing more than to dump the ashes, sell the home, and forget everything.
Last to arrive is youngest sister Lee (Jane Wheeler): a cowgirl, gay, placid, easygoing - she's the farthest flung of the lot. She got away early and seems the most centered, the least scathed.
Rose's presence extends beyond the old home or her words in the found diary. She (played by Louise Nicol) appears from time to time as a dreamy apparition - off to one side and high above the set of the house below - rocking in her chair, reminiscing about her last years, summing up her opinion of each of her daughters. She's the counterpoint to the flurry of activity below; we can see her bitterness and rigidity, but also the sharp turn her life took near its end, and the changes that it wrought.
The fractured family, unspoken anger, sibling resentment - all are very familiar themes, but here these are a mere template for Lambert to build upon; to quickly orientate the audience, then fake them out. At first appearance, the three Leary sisters seem to be stock characters, the selection of their dress and language so markedly different that it seems as if one's meant to see, yes, that siblings grow up differently, they have own their own quirks and personalities, and here we see three such examples.
But slowly, Lambert begins to fill out the characters, giving them dimensionality and life. Far from a somber, Chekovian study of family angst, at its most pitched moments, Very Heaven treads a line dividing poignancy and dark hilarity. The sisters spit out lines with venom. Misunderstandings compound. The audience is kept amused, excited and off-balance - but we feel we're in capable hands.
The play should be an especial pleasure to see later in the run, when the threads of action and dialogue have been tightened up.
- Neil Brouillet
Very Heaven is on until May 30 at Centaur Theatre, 453 St. Francois Xavier St, Montreal. Call 514-288-3161 for tickets.