NFLT Presents Drinking Alone by Norm Foster

Jeff Green | Nov 25, 2010

Photo: Marc Veno as Joe Todd and Kelli Bell as his sister Carrie

Family strife has been the stock in trade of theatre since the days of Euripedes and Aeschylus in ancient Greece.

They offer a recognition factor for the audience, as there are tensions on or just under the surface at some time or another in even the most highly functional families. They also offer a way in to some of the basic existential dichotomies of life/death and love/hate that are also universal. And the way to bring this all out is with a very particular and idiosyncratic story.

In Norm Foster's Drinking Alone, Joe Todd (Marc Veno) is so unnerved by a promised visit by his estranged father Ivan (John Stephen) that he hires an escort, Renee (Danielle Harding) to pretend to be his fiancée. Joe's sister Carrie O'Neill (Kelli Bell) shows up even though she said she wasn't going to. Not only does Carrie have her own issues with her father, she is also, unbeknownst to her brother, on the verge of divorce herself. Carrie also has an alcohol problem, as did her late mother Molly, which is why Ivan left in the first place. The fifth character in Drinking Alone, is Phyllis (Andrea Dickinson), Ivan's current wife, the one character in the play who can see through the facades that the other characters try to create.

Drinking Alone is set up like a situation comedy. It has a static set, Joe Todd's living room. The characters banter with each other, play to the audience for laughs, but unlike a sitcom, the layers of their relationships are peeled away as the play wears on, and the secrets that separate them are slowly revealed.

The play hinges on the performances, and the tone was set in the first scene by Veno and Harding. As they discussed how to carry off the ruse on Joe's father, they established their characters well. Harding used a few particular gestures and brought the right combination of hysteria and practicality to her character, while Veno played Todd, the owner of the family dry-cleaning business, as a man desperate to control his surroundings. Kelli Bell as Carrie arrived on scene next. She is a bitter, high functioning TV personality, and got many of the play’s laughs simply in the comedic timing with which she delivered a liberal number of swear words.

The tensions builds when the doorbell rings, but instead of Ivan, Andrea Dickinson as the soft-spoken, hard-questioning Phyllis comes in first. The way Dickinson played Phyllis, the audience knew immediately that she could see right through Joe and Renee's ruse.

The players are turned away when John Stephen as Ivan Todd arrives on stage, giving the audience the first chance to evaluate this powerful figure whose decision to leave Joe and Carrie behind some 15 years earlier was the formative event in their, and his life.

Once all five of the characters have arrived on the scene, the play unfolds as a series of revelations about the past, with the three family members finally building towards an understanding of where they have come from as a family, and perhaps an inkling of where they are going.

Essentially, Drinking Alone is a drama, not a comedy, but it uses the conventions of comedy to deliver its message, and the actors were up to the challenge.

On the night I saw the play, Friday night, there were a few miscues in timing between the actors that broke the illusion of dialogue once or twice (I heard later that Friday was the lowest energy performance of the run) but even so the performances struck that fine balance between comedy and drama, not quite sinking into farce but keeping the audience laughing through most of the play. Danielle Nevins did a particularly good job balancing the two extremes of her character, to great comic effect.

And Marc Veno reached a pretty good height when he kicked up his heels at the very end of the play, showing that the broken characters in Norm Foster's world are capable of something resembling joy.

Kudos for the set and lighting crew who once again had to deal with that small stage at the Sharbot Lake cafeteria.