STILL LIFE: With a moving insight. |
Over the ten years of their daughter Joe’s life, middle-class Sheila and Bri (Lisa Muller-Jones and Dave Currier) have given her dozens of different personalities. They’ve tried her out as a concert pianist dying of TB, a young woman tragically in love with “a darky,” and a coach-tour lady with respectable gloves and more than a few opinions about the world. Joe herself doesn’t weigh in. This is because she’s a severely brain-damaged epileptic — or, as her Viennese specialist helpfully clarifies, “a Wegetable.”Her various play-personas are simply the patho-comic coping mechanisms of the seriously burdened parents in Joe Egg, a black comedy by Peter Nichols on stage at Mad Horse, under the direction of Christine Louise Marshall. In the rifts and the communion that Nichols draws between Sheila and Bri, Joe Egg unsentimentally explores the question of what can be said to constitute a “life” — as relates not just to Joe, and a human standard of neurological functions, but to her parents, and a human standard of gratification and need.
The script provides Bri and Sheila a highly self-conscious conceit for getting across what their lives are like: for much of the play, particularly in the first act, Bri and Sheila talk directly to the audience. They relate the back-story of Joe’s birth (five days of labor!), share thoughts on themselves and each other (“Everyone’s damaged in one way,” Sheila says), and reenact encounters with the doctors (all caricatured by Bri). Their stagy and turbulent reflexiveness sometimes draws us close to the couple and reveals something intimate, and other times acts to shock and distance us from them.
Sheila and Bri have adapted in very different ways to the realities of their particular type of parenthood. Bri admits that he’s resigned himself to “going through the motions,” while Sheila, as he puts it with an expansive gesture, “embraces all living things." Accordingly, the set of their modest living room is filled with an assortment of Sheila’s inanimate but needy ferns, succulents, and flowering plants. Though there are a lot of them, they look sad and inadequate, filling the corners with green pathos in a painful but certainly acute analogue to their family situation.
Sheila’s salvation is in philosophically mastering the daily details of getting Joe by — the medications, the number and types of fits. Muller-Jones’s Sheila is composed, reasonable, and at times almost eerily sanguine. She smiles with somewhat disconcerting frequency, even through revelations that might choke another mother. This control is all the more striking for the few instances when it breaks — her sudden tears, for example, as she describes watching Joe suddenly conscious enough to knock down a tower of colored blocks. Muller-Jones’s carefully calibrated performance lets us see the obsession, depth, and vulnerabilities of a very stoic woman.
Bri, on the other hand, is a bundle of nerves, unsatisfied libido, and bad jokes, and Muller-Jones does well in establishing a force against which to measure him. “What am I doing talking to you?” he says to Joe, though not without affection. “I might as well be talking to a wall.” Careening between devilishness, candor, and despair, Bri is a more troubled character and, in Currier’s hands, he hangs together with less cohesion than does Sheila, adding up to somewhat less than the sum of his parts. This situation improves in the second act, however, as Bri is given more decisive action and less exposition through which to convey his ambivalence about being Joe’s father.
