And So It Goes
Factory Theatre is currently presenting the world premiere of And So It Goes, George F. Walker’s first play for the stage in 10 years. This ought to be a cause for celebration except that this slight neo-absurdist work contains only two or three ideas that it exhausts about halfway through. The play does not end so much as fizzle out.
In the promising first half we meet middle-class parents Gwen (Martha Burns) and Ned (Peter Donaldson), who are trying to cope with Ned’s downsizing and with their 25-year-old daughter Karen (Jenny Young), who after 23 normal years suddenly became a paranoid schizophrenic. To deal with Karen, Gwen begins therapy sessions with Vonnegut (Jerry Franken), i.e. the deceased author of such novels as Slaughterhouse-Five. Walker could take this idea further but he makes it too clear that Gwen is merely communing with a more rational version of herself. Soon Ned also seeks help from Vonnegut as Karen’s life spirals out of control. The second half begins with a surprise, but otherwise traces Ned and Gwen’s precipitous downward slide into homelessness.
The play’s absurdist humour derives from the matter-of-factness with which Ned and Gwen accept their decline and their penchant for speaking to invisible advisors. This appears in complete contrast with the real pain and helplessness they show when confronted with Karen’s illness. As the couple depends increasingly on Vonnegut for guidance, one feels sure that Walker will draw some parallel between their behaviour and Karen’s schizophrenia to ask who has the power to define sanity or reality for others. That never happens because Walker is more interested in delivering social messages about homelessness via Ned than in exploring all the implications of his story. As a result, our interest wanes in the second half and the play seems overly long at only 90 minutes.
The cast and Walker’s direction are top-notch. Young gives a fantastic performance of both sides of Karen, normal and disturbed. The nuances of Burns’ delivery always make us wonder which side of the sanity/insanity boundary she is really on. Neither Donaldson’s nor Franken’s characters are as fully written, but both actors make them memorable. And So It Goes does not have the visceral impact of vintage Walker, but its turning away from outward shocks to a greater interest in the inner lives of its characters is a development that will be intriguing to follow.
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