OUR LADY OF SPILLS by Edwige Jean-Pierre, directed by Rhoma Spencer (Theatre Archipelago). At Papermill Theatre (67 Pottery). To May 10, Tuesday-Saturday 8 pm, matinees Saturday-Sunday 2 pm. Pwyc-$25. theatrearchipelago.ca. See listing.
There’s no final knockout in Our Lady Of Spills, but the boxing ring set suggests that its two characters, Lillian, a nursing home resident, and Sandrine, a nurse in the facility, are in a battle that neither’s ready to give up.
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At first the pair in Edwige Jean-Pierre’s play seems easily defined. You don’t expect much of a dramatic shift given that the prejudiced elderly white woman won’t have anything to do with someone who isn’t “Canadian,” and the black Haitian nurse lives by a religion that insists she turn the other cheek when wronged.
But Jean-Pierre, who plays Sandrine opposite Lorna Wilson’s Lillian, gives a richness to their interaction. Each has a litany of anger and hurt to share, if only with the audience, and the pair duke it out to the end of the play. Monologues are cleverly interwoven so that themes and images extend from one speech to the next. The play’s irony works especially well when an idea of Lillian’s becomes central to the verb conjugations of Sandrine, a francophone who’s doing her best to improve her English.
The carefulness of the writing shows in the small parallels and contrasts that keep popping up during the show. We see how the two women behave as mothers, realize that each keeps a book by her side which she regards as all-important, see their contradictory attitudes toward their children’s schoolyard fights.
Under Rhoma Spencer’s direction, Jean-Pierre has an engaging comic style that lets her ride over the little hurts Sandrine receives. Wilson doesn’t make Lillian a two-dimensional racist instead, she fleshes out the reasons for Lillian’s narrow-mindedness so that we understand why she’s become a nasty, lonely senior who ostracizes anyone’s offer of friendship.
Jean-Pierre has intentionally underwritten Sandrine, but I’d like to know more about her and her motivations Lillian is the fuller character.
While the ending is emotionally satisfying, it’s also belaboured and needlessly extended here the blend of serious and comic that worked earlier doesn’t enrich the climactic scene.
