Laughter in the Ruins: Psychic Architecture in the Affections of May

*spoilers included in this review

Scorpio Theatre is staging The Affections of May (Norm Foster) at the Pumphouse from October 17^th to the 25^th. The play is a romantic comedy (set in the 90's) with dramatic undercurrents. It follows the tumult of May, abandoned by her husband Brian (affair), to run a failing bed and breakfast in a small Ontario rural town. With the exit of her husband Brian, May is left to contend with both emotional and financial ruin. Into this fragile world, enter Quinn & Hank, the former an itinerant misfit living on the edge of the community and the latter a quirky bank manager whose affection for May borders on absurdity. There is also the repeated mention of a 'car phone', which as I argue (below) takes on metaphoric weight in the play.

A unidimensional reading of this play would see May as the unfortunate product of patriarchal rendering; she has become an indiscernible object in the world of Brian, her subjectivity (inner life) has been stripped of its vitality and reduced to a quiet functionality. She has no distinct narrative, outside of what meaning his narrative bestows on her. This is potentially why her story only really starts once he leaves. In the first scene, she is seen blasting the music through the house (before he leaves), on the surface of things there is rhythm and lyricality in her life; this is an expression of what Julia Kristeva (French philosopher) terms the chora – the free-flowing rhythm of the unconscious mind. It is the feral music of our psyche, a rhythm that can never be fully described or constrained by whatever score sheet (social structures, cultural beliefs) we use to orchestrate our existence. The music can be seen as, either, a desperate attempt to drown out the truth of her own, unconsciously perceived, emptiness and insignificance, or a desire to reclaim the sensuality and lyricality of life.

This play is a theatre of the interior, where the stage becomes a projection of May’s unconscious life. What appears to be a simple domestic comedy is in fact the dramatization of her psychic recovery – we see her moving from freedom to expression, the inner music finds its liberation through the dismantling of psychological structures that confined her to the margins of her life. To see May, though, as only the unfortunate subject of patriarchal conditioning would be wrong, because in doing so, we strip her of her agency, and we are also insulated from understanding where it is she actively maintains and supports the conditions of her disempowerment.  As we see in the play, she teeters on the edge of taking Brian back, saying something to the effect that she would live with him no matter how dull or insipid life between them was. This makes sense because beneath the humour and doggedness of the character lies what Lauren Berlant (American writer) termed cruel optimism. It is the idealization of, and or attachment to something (idea, relationship, fantasy, etc) that not only impedes but actively subverts us. If you think about it, it is an extremely dark emotion to experience – to desperately cling onto a fantasy that has been emptied of purpose and to feed it with the remnants of our own vitality, knowing that it will never nourish us back. We hear early on in the play that there’s a lot that’s falling apart in the house, porches, doors, cars, etc. – the symbolism is clear, the fantasy between May and Brian is decaying. Inter-personal entropy, in this situation, is the result of tending to dying fantasies instead of tending to the living pulse behind them.

The psychological logic is clear here: May will not make and take the decisions she needs until Brian leaves. His departure is the necessary collapse of a disintegrating system; all that he symbolically represents (order, consistency, predictability, etc.) must be voided in May’s world before she can move on and claim the chora (music) of her life. She thinks she should remain in a loveless marriage even though she knows that it has become a hollow and fruitless arrangement. If she wont make decisions, decisions will be made for her. It is a very hard but necessary existential truth. Quinn comes into May’s life at a critical juncture; she must rebuild her life, and he quite literally underscores this theme by offering to fix the house for board and lodging. Quinn exists outside of the symbolic order of the community; he has no kids, no family, no career, and no clear motivations. His personal history is fractured and suffused by themes of deep suffering; May’s home belonged to his family once, and we learn that he grew up there before everything was lost. Quinn’s journey epitomizes in many ways a poetics of space, a term popularized by Gaston Bachelard. It is the inner architecture of meaning and loss that we experience in physical spaces. Sometimes, a room is never just a room, there are images and experiences that write themselves over those spaces.

For Quinn, returning home is to understand his lived experience and history in that space. The house becomes a site of psychic ruin, it is the space where his arc of suffering began. In rebuilding the home for May, he is in many ways rebuilding his soul and is reassembling the fragments of self that time and trauma have scattered. It is a beautiful and powerful metaphor, how the act of repairing what is around us mirrors the necessary psychological repair that must occur within us. The poetics of space is not only about nostalgia but also about intimacy; and in this space we see May & Quinn develop an attraction for each other. It is clear that May & Quinn feel more than passion, it is mutual psychological recovery and spiritual repair that binds them. Is this trauma bonding? Unlikely, there is no evasion of how trauma has shaped them. They must both return to the site of the wound to begin again, not through avoidance but through acknowledgment.

It is appropriate that a car phone (an expensive anomaly in the 90s) becomes a central but quiet motif in this play. There are many ways to understand these symbolizations, but for me, just like phones mediate conversations between human beings through the screen of technology, so too are many of our conversations mediated by the symbolic screens of cruel optimism. We talk to each other through personal fantasies that have long since died and have long since lost their relevance. In this way, we do not really talk to each other; we talk around each other, being careful not to puncture fantasies that we know hold the other person’s narrative together (and ours as well). This is a sort of diplomacy of dreams, where we actively maintain our fantasies (individual or collective) because the collapse that would expose them would be unbearable. The car phone with its static hum and distortion (especially apt in the 90’s!) becomes a metaphor for how much of our communication is always out of sync, flickering like a weak signal. It is apt that Quinn steals (and breaks, I think, if memory serves me correctly) the phone out of Brian’s car; this is a symbolic disruption of that diplomacy of dreams. The implication is clear: there are moments in life where we must symbolically cut the line to dead narratives and abandon the fantasies we sustain, via cruel optimism, with one another.

As the play shows us, living well will often necessitate the brave dismantling of fantasies that lend nothing to our internal structure of meaning. If we are to embody the bravery of May & Quinn, there are times where we must reject conversations that do not reveal the emptiness of our dead fantasies. Renunciation of dead fantasies requires an existential re-authoring of life - this re-scripting is evidenced in the revelation of the dramatic fact, during the play, that Quinn is an avid reader. His bag is full of books, here is a man who is potentially looking to re-architect his life through fiction. Maybe Quinn reads not to escape but in the hope that life can be imaginatively reconfigured. His reading might be a quiet act of reconstruction - here we glimpse at the possibility that personal ruin might present an opportunity for one to re-imagine (and consequently re-write) their life from the ground up. The wreckage of May's love and Quinn's historical suffering reveal something poignant to us - that even through the tumult of life, something luminous can endure within us - the rhythm of hope and the poetry of becoming.

To the Production - Leo Tucker, Quinn, was magnetic. His poise and characterization was top-shelf stuff for community theatre; the internal suffering and the disassociative humour of the character were brilliantly balanced. The character is there, but he is also not there. It is the energy of a character who wants to disappear but doesn't know how to. This was dramatized beautifully by Leo. Meagan Schultz and AJ Pierce, as May and Brian, were reliable, taking us through the emotional architecture of the play with steadfastness. It was a diplomatic rendering, carefully composed and never indulgent. The chemistry between Quinn and May was excellent, at times powerful. There is a moment where they are playing Scrabble, before they lean in to kiss – the tension in that scene was palpable, dense enough to stay suspended in the air like an electrical current waiting for contact. The comedic tension and exchange between them was fantastic, but the drama was thin. This is where we lose the dark energy of May’s cruel optimism. In this play specifically, the comedy arises from May’s narratival collapse, the stories of her life are falling apart, and though overdoing this would be maudlin, under-doing it blunts the emotional impact of the play. Which means we walk out feeling good and light, but not really touched, and not having left being any more emotionally literate. This is certainly an aspect that the artistic vision of this play could have put more of an accent on. It would not have under-served the comedy; if anything, the contrapuntal tension between comedy and drama heightens the resonance of both. The tonal duality would have been richer if the comedy had been set up against genuine despair. Some will say, nope, May’s indefatigable humor is her laughing at the abyss; she stares into it, and her laughter completely liberates her from the vice of melancholy. Fair enough, but is that an accurate representation of human life? How many people have we known that have done that? Probably none, the reason is: laughter is resistance, sure, but it is rarely liberation. Laughter alone is not a thing-in-itself, because such a thing does not exist in isolation from other inner states. Seeing laughter as an end in itself might be mistaking endurance for hope, and these characters cannot get by on endurance alone; they have been through far too much. We see the development and sharpening of hope between the characters while they fall in love with each other, but that’s only one half of the equation. Without the periodic gravity of the drama, the comedy in this production drifts off into the merely pleasant.

That being said, the direction was generally good, drawing out the internal lives of the characters with consideration and care. It is always great to see a director who shows us the inner lives of characters without presenting caricatures to the audience. We see something of the beat and pulse and beat of human life through this. Nick Wensrich, Hank, was very good, exhibiting the quirkiness and awkwardness of the character with charm. He dramatically epitomized the bureaucratic-weasel archetype very well, and his comedic timing was outstanding. The production values were good, perfectly suited to the narrative. The set was good, serving as an effective point of focus for the drama.

A good community-theatre production – great intent, good execution, and an artistic fidelity toward examining human themes that are difficult and enduring.  

Rating – 6.5