Yerma at Coal Mine Theatre
Photo by Tim Leyes
The 1934 Spanish drama Yerma, set in rural Spain, centres a woman named Yerma struggling to conceive a child. Simon Stone’s hit 2016 adaptation transplants the action to the modern day and swaps Yerma for “Her” (Sarah Gadon), a lifestyle blogger and journalist.
Her is in a strained long-term relationship with John (Daren A. Herbert), an often out-of-town corporate worker. Though Her has taken numerous fertility tests, John refuses to go for one. Her’s work as a journalist — a profession obsessed with truth — contrasts the tangle of lies and gaslighting that is her personal life.
But her blog has more thematic and narrative sway than her job. There, she chronicles her life in detail. And beyond using pseudonyms for her friends and family, she tells the truth. Factually, anyway; structurally, there is a falseness. While Her’s life is fragmented, a blog demands narrative cohesion. It demands plot. To write it, Her has to synthesize her life’s disparate moments into an artificially unified whole.
The play’s structure compellingly juxtaposes the synthesis of a blog. It takes place over five years, and is made up of short scenes that start and stop almost randomly. A director therefore has a choice: work against this friction by making a production that is more narratively cohesive than Stone’s script, or embrace fragmentation and enjoy the play’s rough edges.
For her Toronto-set Coal Mine Theatre production, Diana Bentley has excitingly picked the second option.
The playing space, designed and lit by Kaitlin Hickey, is neutral, a sunken white rectangle surrounded by the audience on all four sides. Since Stone abruptly leaps through time and space between each scene, the emptiness of the stage means that location is ambiguous until the actors define it through text and body. Often this is done straightforwardly, like in the play’s opening scene of Her and John moving into a new house.
But sometimes the production uses this ambiguity to toy with our perceptions. In one scene, costume and body language seems to indicate we are inside, but we are told halfway through we are in fact outside. In an another, a drunken 3AM quip momentarily misdirects us:
“JOHN: How are you feeling?
HER: Great. Do you want to go home?
JOHN: We are home.
HER: I know. I was joking.”
These moments of uncertainty disarm us and make us doubt our perceptions of reality. This fits well — Stone’s adaptation is more interested in the subjective psychology of its protagonist than the original is, so it’s only natural to draw attention to the audience’s own subjective psychologies. Bentley’s production therefore emerges as a kind of theatre of the mind; and when more direct references to physical location resurface towards the play’s end as Her and John decide to move out of the house, we’ve almost been trained not to care.
The transitions further this sense of fragmentation. Bentley makes them as abrupt as possible: a snap to black in the middle of a sentence, and a thrashing sea of bass-heavy techno by sound designer Keith Thomas submerges the room in chaos. Then quickly back to the bright stage and the next scene begins. There is almost no regard for the viewer: this is the side of Her we’re not meant to see. It is not as consumable as her blog, and it shouldn’t be. This is life.
Sometimes, though, Hickey does not snap us back to white after a transition. Sometimes it’s a slow fade — a small dome of light, treading through the darkness, caressing Her and John’s crumbling relationship. These scenes have a dreamlike quality, and are a respite from the violent momentum that propels much of the play. In the final transition, which leads into a key moment of violence, Thomas and Hickey change tactics: the sound effect that usually ends the transition arrives as usual, but the lights do not change. Instead, we are left in darkness for the violence. This event irrevocably changes the lives of these characters, and disrupts the show’s theatrical language accordingly.
Within this carefully calibrated atmosphere live Gadon, Herbert, and the supporting cast. Since this is Gadon’s stage debut, it seems appropriate she’s working in such a neutral playing space; like a camera, it frames and accentuates every movement. About halfway through, she and Herbert become immensely liberated. They dynamically toss their bodies through the air and release piercing beams of energy in all directions.
A Her monologue about the Virgin Mary reminds us of the play’s early twentieth century origin. Yet, by that point, we’re hanging on to Gadon’s every word, and it feels somehow right to be discussing Christianity. The Spain of the original meshes with the London of the adaptation meshes with the TTC chimes below, and all the fragments of those vastly different times and places crystallize into one prismatic whole: Yerma.