Vision Theatre begins its new season with the unofficial Canadian premiere of Christopher Durang’s Miss Witherspoon. It is an ambitious and tricky play because it has little action, with a sparsely elegant set and simple lighting, and focuses primarily on dialogue and comic delivery, relying entirely on the strength of the cast and the eponymous character in particular to push it forward.

Durang tells the story of Miss Witherspoon, a confused and stubborn soul in the afterlife who initially wishes nothing more than to buck the system of reincarnation entirely and to escape thought itself.

Playing Miss Witherspoon is Teri Rata Loretto, a veteran actress whose perfectly honed craft drives the show. She moves easily through the character, conveying as much by way of a careful slouch or a sly glance as through any dialogue. In the hands of a lesser actress the wholly antipathetic main character might remain so, but Loretto manages to redeem her.

The rest of the cast mix good and bad in ordinary quantities. Each role is played with a sort of one-note devotion: solidly amusing if unimaginative. Overall the production was good, and the opening night crowd responded genially, laughing lustily where required.

The only problem with this play is the play itself. Quite simply, I found Durang’s Miss Witherspoon an awful piece of writing. Aw. Ful. His satiric take on religion is nothing less than intellectual charlatanism of the highest order. His thinking not only tiresomely clichéd, but feeling entirely tacked together. The clumsy swipes at the Crucifixion, for example, sound like the carping of an angst-riddled teenager.

The plot of this play meanders blindly in similar mien. Dripping with a funny, world-weary nihilism in the beginning, the play quickly loses gas and becomes lost as Miss Witherspoon herself changes. There’s a moment of epiphany about halfway through this play, as she endlessly begs admittance to the “General Anesthesia afterlife,” where you realize Durang isn’t cleverly pursuing an artistic point, but quite honestly has nowhere to go. Like a lost man, he consistently returns to the same lines. The end of the play quite understandably dissolves into a sort of crass sentimentality.

As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Sept 14, 2006
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=10332