Director Kym Clayton has come up with a winner with this Melissa Ross play. It’s cleverly and carefully written and requires a deft directorial interpretation and a capable cast. This production was well served by both. Indeed the scenes of greatest emotional charge were some of the very best performed I have seem for a long time.
What could have been a ritualised portrayal of a dysfunctional American family, collected for the cancer suffering oldest sister’s 41st birthday weekend in the family’s Cape Cod holiday house, went well beyond the stereotype. We saw the nuanced handling of that issue and its obvious emotional charge, along with the contrasting personalities of the three sisters, as well as their three, equally contrasting, partners. To work on stage this all clearly relies on intelligence from the playwright, the Director, and all six cast.
Fortunately, in this instance, those elements aligned.
The play begins and ends with the couple, Jess and Fred, managing – and at times not – Jess’s living with cancer. Dora Stamos and Christian Dewar are, quite simply, splendid in interpreting these roles. They were natural and entirely credible. Stamos effortlessly showed the character’s stoicism, sense of responsibility, humour, anguish and inner conflict along with the way she related to all other characters and their own emotional needs. Dewar, as her foodie journalist husband, was equally believable. His sense of the dramatic moment, and acute sense of timing and tone were remarkable. His attempts at making peace between the sisters were often excruciatingly real, and the emotional strength of his character couldn’t be faulted. The pair’s final scene was both enigmatic and moving.
In many ways the complex relationship between the three sisters is the central feature of the play. To say they are very different from each other decidedly understates it. While Jess, in the main, represents a degree of control and normality, the other two are more explosive. Melissa Moon played the volatile Amy to the hilt. She was extreme, but not a caricature of the self-obsessed bride-to-be. She was believably irritating for much of the action, disrupting a number of scenes with attention-seeking outbursts, often intending hurt to others. Amanda Grifsas, as the youngest sister, Celia, was equally convincing, but in a pouting, often adolescent way when being negative, and in a raucously laughing way when finding humour in a situation or mocking one or other of her sisters.
In one of the scenes of greatest dramatic impact in the whole play, on the dock of the holiday house, Stamos, Moon and Grifsas gave a remarkable performance as the three sisters finally confronting their own truths. It was powerful theatre.
To complete the sextet, Josh van’t Padje was a convincingly placid and self-doubting Josh, Amy’s husband-to-be, while Nathan Brown was suitably ill-at-ease and gauche as Hunter, Celia’s partner.
The action was well spaced in Kym Clayton and Trisha Graham’s set, divided between a domestic interior, an outdoor patio and the seaside dock. It served the play well, as did Timothy Hall and Warren McKenzie’s timely sound effects and James Allenby’s discreet lighting.
This was a noteworthy production, which comfortably blended drama and comedy. It covered significant social and emotional issues, and had some fine acting. Frankly, it should be seen.
