Louise Lambert and Fiona Reid in “People, Places and Things”, Photo by Barry McCluskey
It seems we’re witnessing a performance of Chekhov’s The Seagull. The tormented Konstantin is professing his acute idolization of Nina, the young woman who wants to be a great actress. Something is off though. Nina’s confused. “I am a seagull. No that’s not right.” But there was a seagull, wasn’t there? A disruptive voice offstage disturbs her. Suddenly Nina—no, the actress playing her—is in the throws of a full-on meltdown.
A mass of writhing bodies swarm the stage and we are immersed in the ecstatic, drug-induced throb of a dance club. The exhilarating and sensual spectacle is wrenched away as quickly as it descended. We meet our Nina again as Emma (Louise Lambert)—a twitchy, high-strung mess on the phone with her mother outside of a detox facility. What follows in playwright Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things, presented by Coal Mine Theatre, is Emma’s relationship to the 12-step program and an intimate, experiential examination of addiction.
As Emma is checked in, it’s tricky at first to tell how real anything is. Set designer Steve Lucas has made the stage floor, which extends into the audience, a white on black grid, giving director Diana Bentley’s whole staging an uncanny sense of manifesting on a holodeck. Bonnie Beecher and Jeff Pybus’ dynamic lighting—sterile blasts of white, psychedelic colour and ominous flickers—convey the glitchy hyper-reality of her withdrawal and subsequent therapy. The kaleidoscopic trippyness of the projected EXIT sign has an especially persuasive hallucinatory effect. In his sound design, Thomas Ryder Payne bombards us with disjointed bits of dialogue we realize only later are portentous fragments of future conversation, making time itself an unreliable construct.
Alyssa Martin’s movement direction also contributes to this erratic verity. An orderly with a clipboard asking questions suddenly becomes a multitude of orderlies with clipboards. Is this multiple check-ins, over time, condensed into a delirious vision or a disturbed abstraction of a single interaction? The other inpatients, when not in group therapy, manifest as spastic doppelgängers.
While we catch brief glimpses of the other inpatients personalities during the group therapy role-playing sessions which Emma, as an actress, is weirdly resistant to; the pivotal relationships of her stay at this facility are with Foster (Matthew Gouveia), a troubled mentor; Mark (Farhang Ghajar), challenging her reluctance to engage; and Fiona Reid as both a doctor and therapist who, Emma keeps remarking, look too much like her mother. With this dual mother figure, Emma finds a compassionate adversary with whom she dances around the question of whether human faith has any practical value. Though her substance abuse has stalled any progress in life and propels her dangerously close to the end of it, Emma has a remarkable clarity of mind about the purpose of drugs. In a meaningless void full of suffering, what holds better value than the glorious comfort they provide?
Macmillan has Emma reference plays, movies and philosophical texts. She’s well read and considers herself grounded in tangible reality, deeply suspicious of the program and its reliance on some greater purpose to human existence. The notions of reality and truth become a fixation here, in which her conversations, especially with the doctor, betray a solid history of rigorous, methodical meditation. She eventually admits her real name is “Sarah,” furthering the theme of role-playing and dubious reality. Our tenuous trust in her is strained even as our investment deepens.
Lambert is a fully compelling throughout, conveying both Emma’s intellect and agonized physicality. A late scene with her parents, in the very bedroom where she grew up, is a disheartening climax. Reid (mother) and Oliver Dennis (father) convey a restrained exhaustion that betrays a history of pain and disappointment. Their cool detachment is more devastating than the bitter words they say. The tension radiating from their interaction makes it clear that her journey of self-care doesn’t end with a happy reunion; demons will not be vanquished with apologetic words. And when her mother finally calls her by name, it is a jarring moment of clarity for us.
People, places and things refers to the crucial nouns of recovery, those bugaboos that trigger relapse. This play, deftly realized, grounds us in characters, ambiance and textures that resonate with healing possibility and a viscerally pervasive threat.
People, Places and Things
running February 9 to March 25, 2025
The Coal Mine Theatre (2076 Danforth Ave)
running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes (including intermission)
Cast of “People, Places and Things”, Photo by Barry McCluskey