Communion reaches out to characters, audience

Daniel MacIvor’s play Communion now running at Theatre Network opens with an ambiguous question that is never really answered. Quite possibly because everyone sitting in the audience has a different frame of reference.

This 90-minute show is unsettling and provocative, but MacIvor has obviously penned it with a great deal of warmth and affection. In this gentle treatment of three women’s broken lives, he takes us on a journey of personal and spiritual discovery, and drops us off with heartfelt emotion.

The three characters are mother, daughter and a therapist. In the hands of a lesser playwright, they would be standard issue characters. However, MacIvor creates three enigmas. No one is who they appear to be and the surface contradictions are a cover for the wounded spirits hiding deep inside.

In the first scene set inside the bland confines of a therapist’s office, two women sit tensely on the edges of white leather chairs. The movement is slow and the minimalist dialogue is spaced with long pauses. However, director Marianne Copithorne brilliantly takes advantage to create comic anxiety and dramatic tension.

Natascha Girgis as Leda is at once comic, manic and volatile as a woman with cancer coming to terms with death, past addictions and a fragmented relationship with her daughter.

Leda has been in therapy for some time, but is either tongue-tied or lobs salty insults at Carolyn, her therapist. To avoid conversation, Leda taps her foot nervously, drinks water, smoothes her eyebrow and pulls a gum wrapper out of pocket much to the audience’s amusement. A man behind me whispered to his companion, “I know exactly how she feels.”

While Leda’s scene with Carolyn is hilarious, a meeting with her daughter is more tragic and poignant. Powerful in her role, Girgis exudes a touching mix of fatalism and optimism that makes her heroic and pitiable in one fell swoop.

Leda’s daughter Annie (Sarah Sharkey) is the truth teller, a former drug dealer turned Bible-thumping zealot who blames her mother for their estrangement. Annie’s evangelical prowess is frightening, and Sharkey plays her as a woman of tough masculine convictions but with an inner femininity that never wanes.

Rounding out the cast is Carolyn, a therapist whose advice brings mother and daughter together. Carolyn however, is deeply conflicted with her own life. She hides behind the mantle of professionalism but eventually reveals that her own spiritual compass is missing.

Ironically, even though MacIvor wrote Communion as an homage to therapy, the script gives us few details of Carolyn. She is more of a mystery. Yet Kate Ryan fleshes her out with an elegant reserve and warm gentleness. And when the script limits her speech, Ryan has an uncanny ability to impart empathy, kindness and anger by simply raising an eyebrow or moving an arm.

Communion is a powerful and tender portrait that embraces inner spirituality and reminds us that by reaching out to others, we can regain what we’ve lost.