Three Women of Swatow at Tarragon
NOTE: This was a preview performance.
Something beautiful is brewing over at the Tarragon Extraspace. Three Women of Swatow, which is finally opening after being delayed from 2020, deals with heavy subject matter — murder, intergenerational trauma, abuse — but remains unpretentious and vital.
Often, especially at a large theatre like Tarragon, there can be a bit of a fog over the whole experience of seeing a show — yeah, the shows are usually solid, but I usually find myself sitting between seventy year old subscribers and wondering what I’m doing there. Plus, if the play turns out to be run-of-the-mill Canadian naturalism, I feel like I could’ve had this exact same experience at Tarragon twenty years ago.
There was no fog over the audience of Three Women. Perhaps it’s just because it’s a preview, but, for Tarragon, the audience felt particularly young, and the show never sent us into autopilot. The show lives on the line between drama and dark comedy, and navigates those two tones clearly — it never made us feel bad for laughing or left us wondering if something serious should be funny.
Three Women is even confident enough to, at the beginning of the play, fake us out, and pretend it’s more conventional than it is — at first, we see Grandmother (Carolyn Fe), sitting in a realistic looking apartment, reading to herself from the Bible. To me, a character reading to themselves signals that the author wants to include a monologue, but isn’t daring enough to truly break the fourth wall; that’s not the case here, however: after she reads, Grandmother addresses us directly. And then she takes her clothes off.
And so the self-aware unconventionality of Three Women begins. The set, too, which initially seems realistic, transitions to something far less literal — at one point (spoilers!), this non-literal space means we get to see a flashback of Mother (Chantria Tram) celebrating finding out that she is pregnant with her husband’s child in the same bathroom where, in the present-day timeline, she is storing the dismembered remains of her husband in the bathtub. That’s a wonderfully ironic and ardently theatrical use of space — I loved it.
Throughout, director Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster makes daring theatrical choices like these, and it’s super refreshing. Also, according to Tarragon’s website, in 2020, this play was estimated at 100 minutes, but now it’s down to 80! I appreciated these cuts, if some were indeed made — Three Women efficiently executes what it wants to do.
Anyway, go! It’s a super solid night out, and one of the best things I’ve seen since the pandemic. I’ll probably go back to a non-preview performance.