The Norbals: a comedy of tension
By Kenn Stanton
Lance Writer
November 28, 2007
 The gathering of a dysfunctional family for a seasonal celebration is a modern-day stereotype. Winner of the Herman Voaden National Playwriting Competition, Winnipeg playwright Brian Drader’s play, The Norbals, takes dysfunctional to a higher level. The family consists of a mother, father, three adult sons and their partners, and a fourth son on the verge of adulthood. The family’s Christmas celebration attempts to accommodate three different religions and three sexual orientations. Add to this mix a variety of extreme coping strategies and one begins to approach the tension in this script. A family crisis breaks the barriers of politeness and allows its members to confront problems long unspoken.
This is a performance of a comedy filled with tension, not all of it intended by the author. Two additional tensions hamper the audience’s enjoyment of the humour.
Actors of colour are, and must be, given the opportunity to play challenging roles, and not just those written for their race. As audience, we understand and accept the University Players as the performance arm of the School of Dramatic Art, where young actors-in-training gain experience before an audience. In Act I, when first we see a black actor in a mixed race family, we feel tension. In this production the actor playing the mother is black; the father and three sons, white. Are we to ignore her race or is it a part of the situation? We listen more intently to the text to decide. When we hear no racial clues, we conclude the character is white and choose to ignore the actor’s race. When the next actor of colour appears, along with a mention of her dreadlocks, we assume that the character is not white (although some white people do wear dreadlocks). That tension eases. But, in Act II, the actress playing the mother creates a racial joke, when she delivers an otherwise innocent line with a glance at the audience that reads, “We both know I’m a black actor playing a white woman, don’t we?” This subtle action gets one of the biggest laughs in the show: the release of tension that lingered from Act I.
The second tension was especially damaging: it hurt both the audience and the actors. Performing a comedy is an enormous challenge. Actors learn their lines and rehearse them with rhythms that become comfortable. When they are faced with a variable, the audience’s reaction, they must alter their delivery to accommodate laughter. Early in the first act, when the cast failed to adjust, the audience made the adjustment. After a few times of missing the next line, we began to withhold our laughter, to miss nothing.
Under the direction of Michael Dobbin, all the actors give strong believable performances of complex characters, some of them played against body type (any football player would envy Eric Miinch’s quads). Natalie Morgan creates a telephone chatterbox mom who later delivers some of the most thoughtful lines in the play. David Baker is the unruffled father living in the eye of a hurricane, although he does make a weapon of his camera; his portrayal of age is unforced and convincing.
David Court’s unit set creatively and attractively provides the large number of acting spaces this script demands: a bedroom, a breakfast nook, a living room, a kitchen, an apartment, an airline cabin, a washroom, an airport, a clothing store, a park, and a hospital room. To watch the crew set up the hospital room is a treat; the entrance of the bed is processional.
This is a good show to see before going home to one’s own family gatherings.
The Norbals continues at the Essex Hall Theatre with performances November 28-30 and December 1-2.
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