Halfway There At Drayton Entertainment
Drayton Entertainment is doing southwestern Ontario a favour this summer by mounting two of Norm Foster’s best plays, Doris and Ivy in the Home at St Jacobs and now Halfway There at their eponymous playhouse in tiny Drayton, Ontario.
Halfway There is Foster at his best. If you are an American who has never seen a Norm Foster play, check this one out and you will understand why Norm Foster is so often called Canada’s Neil Simon.
The laughs are frequent and very funny. Some are just raunchy enough to lend the proceedings a certain piquancy without ever giving real offense. (“Sometimes life pisses on your leg like a blind bulldog.”) What’s more, the jokes aren’t merely a series of one liners. They arise naturally and spontaneously from the characters and their situation.
Indeed, in Halfway There Foster has done a masterful job of creating four very different and completely rounded women who are far more than mere vehicles for his humour. No one can accuse Foster of suffering from that dread affliction “the male gaze.”
The set up is classic Foster. We’re in tiny Stewiacke, Nova Scotia, a backwater whose only claim to fame is that it lies exactly halfway between the Equator and the North Pole, hence the title.
Handsome Dr. Sean Merrit (Tyrell Crews) shows up on a temporary assignment to fill in for a vacationing physician at the local clinic. When he steps into Junior’s Diner he is immediately beguiled by comely waitress Janine (Rebecca Gibian), as which red-blooded Canadian be wouldn’t be.
The laugh-filled passage of their star-crossed, off-again, off-again, maybe on-again courtship becomes the two-hour passage of Foster’s stage. They make delightful sparring partners, both on the page and in Crews’ and Gibian’s note-perfect performances.
Janine has that unnerving ability some women possess of seeing right through a man’s bulls**t. (“We decided to break it off.” “She dumped you.”) For his part, Sean has that endearing stick-to-itiveness built into the male organism because, as Benedick says in Much Ado, “the world must be peopled.”
Foster cannily answers the unspoken question “Why would a doctor with a promising career be interested in a small-town waitress?” by giving Janine not only a razor sharp wit but a backstory as a globe-trotting representative of a fashion house who quit to find something more down to earth in her hometown.
As enjoyable as watching the delicate mating dance of Sean and Janine is, the true richness of Halfway There lies in the hilarious Greek chorus of Janine’s friends who meet at Junior’s for coffee every day.
Vi (Karen Wood), Mary Ellen (Helen Taylor), and Rita (Susie Burnett) are Stewiacke natives who comment and kibitz and generally speak their minds with no filter at all.
When they explain that Janine is taking so long in the washroom because she is experiencing an unusually heavy period – there a no secrets in Stewiacke we quickly learn – Sean suggests that she should come to the clinic for an examination since that could be a symptom of something more serious.
That in turn leads to open speculation among the three friends that this is a ploy to get to see Janine naked. (And what red-blooded Canadian boy wouldn’t want to?)
And so it goes, with one embarrassing revelation following another wisecrack following another impolitic observation. Yet these three are not mere excuses on which to hang a series of set ups and one liners. Foster has given us three fully-rounded human beings.
Vi has been living in sin with a local cop. When he gets a lateral transfer to Thunder Bay she must decide if she wants to get married to follow the man she loves.
Mary Ellen is an overburdened housewife whose forbearance cracks when her family ignores her birthday. In an attempt to make it up to her, her husband takes to coming home at lunchtime for extended bouts of acrobatic sex, something Mary Ellen finds exhausting and exhilarating in approximately equal measure.
Rita is a vivacious divorcee whose out in the open flirtatiousness – Mary Ellen observes, “My clothes say ‘Mom with two kids.’ Yours say ‘open for business.’” – masks a sad tale of the breakup of a marriage after the tragic death of a child and an unbearable loneliness.
Foster allows each of these three gals a moment in the spotlight, either funny or touching, that allows us to see them whole. The three actresses who embody them are uniformly excellent.
At play’s end no one’s situation is completely resolved; they all seem, yes, halfway there. But we have gotten to know and care for them and, I at least, wish them all good luck and godspeed.
This cast seems to have been born to be interpreters of Norm Foster, thanks in no small part I’m sure to the sure-handed direction of Max Reimer who has what looks like decades of experience directing his plays.
The entire action of Halfway There unfolds in the welcoming confines of Junior’s Diner. The handsome set, one of the best I’ve seen at Drayton, is by Sean Mulcahy. It’s very nicely lit by Siobhán Sleath, and with a fraction of the candlepower available to places like Shaw and Stratford I might add. Costumes by Julia Holbert are unassuming and just right.
After the disappointing Those Movies at the Foster Festival, Drayton is performing a public service by reminding us why Norm Foster is, arguably, Canada’s most beloved playwright.
Finally, a tip of the hat to director Reimer for noting in his bio that he once directed a play by someone called Neil Simon, whom he describes as the “USA’s Norm Foster.”
Footnote: Stewiacke is a real place (population 1,557). I checked. And yes, Stewiacke’s great claim to fame is that it lies exactly halfway between the equator and the North Pole. Some protest that the actual halfway point lies a nine-minute drive to the north, in Alton, Nova Scotia. This is what passes for controversy in Canada.
Halfway There plays through July 21, 2024 at Drayton Playhouse in Drayton, Ontario, a 45-minute drive north of Stratford. For more information and to purchase tickets visit the Drayton Entertainment website.
[image: Drayton Entertainment]
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