Public Enemy at Canadian Stage
Photo by Dahlia Katz
Family dinners are a common sight in Anglophone theatre. This isn’t surprising: the setting is familiar to most, easy to mine conflict out of, and fairly simple to stage. But despite its popularity, making exciting theatre out of this setting can be difficult. Sometimes, it’s too static to be interesting; often it just feels overplayed.
But Québecois playwright Olivier Choinière’s Public Enemy finds a few different ways of making this setting exciting.
The play, directed by Brendan Healy in English at Canadian Stage, depicts two dinners one year apart. The topic of conversation is firmly Canadian, and often vaguely political — Stephen Harper, Kathleen Wynne, and Pierre Trudeau are all mentioned. The dinners are also intergenerational: the guests include three middle-aged siblings, their mother Elizabeth (Rosemary Dunsmore), and two children.
One way Public Enemy makes things exciting is by overlapping conversations. Like a real life dinner table, multiple conversations go on at once. This forces the audience to choose which conversation to pay attention to. This is in many ways liberating, and engagingly gives the listener something to do. But because it’s impossible to listen to everything, it also means any individual audience member is having some information withheld from them.
And Public Enemy further fleshes out this tendency to withhold, especially in its first scene: while the adults talk in the dining room, the children — two cousins, the 11 year old Olivia (Maja Vujicic) and the teenage Tyler (Finley Burke) — talk in the living room. Through the open door on the back wall of the dining room, we can vaguely see and hear the children, but it’s impossible to get much sense of what’s going on.
Then everything switches. After ten or so minutes of that initial setup, Julie Fox’s set revolves, and the play’s first scene repeats itself, this time with the living room conversation as the focus.
This is an interesting theatrical conceit, and worthy of further exploration. But surprisingly, for the rest of Public Enemy, time only moves forward, and we instead get other theatrical treats, like a balcony encounter with a squirrel puppet that is simultaneously the show’s lightest and darkest moment.
But I find Public Enemy difficult to talk about. It’s so confidently economical in its delivery of these theatrical ideas that it doesn’t even feel like “exploration” any more. It’s just execution: they’re good ideas, and the show knows it.
And the execution is flawless. Richard Feren’s sound design elegantly straddles real and surreal tones, as is appropriate to the moment; Healy, in collaboration with Fox, gives the second dinner a little metatheatrical punch by having the actors leave the set to fetch things from the exposed wings; and the actors’ body language is perfectly calibrated.
This Public Enemy is rigorously conceived and endlessly entrancing. Certainly, it goes by faster than any family dinner.