In Honour, playwright Joanna Murray-Smith uses a poet’s sensibility to bring some new understanding to the age-old questions surrounding love and marriage, fidelity and infidelity. Unlike the countless comedies that treat affairs of the heart with a light comic touch, Murray-Smith takes this story seriously, saying in an interview that she wanted the audience “to move through the play experiencing the competing feelings of all of the characters” so that the “tragedy of the story” could come through.
Renaissance Theatreworks’ new production of Honour surely realizes Murray-Smith’s desire. It’s impossible not to feel the pain of Honor and Gus, the couple of 32 years at the center of the play. But any “understanding” we get of the situation comes from “the outside,” mostly through Murray-Smith’s pithy—but abstract—nuggets of wisdom. The short, episodic scenes are so schematic—at least at first—that they offer little insight into the situation that’s unfolding. As the play progresses, we understand more.
At the outset we meet the couple (Brian Mani and Laura Gordon), seemingly happy, comfortable and loving. But it doesn’t last long. Gus meets a journalist over 30 years his junior, and a few scenes later Gus and Honor are talking about how to split up the retirement accounts.
The meat of the play comes as the couple—along with their daughter and even Gus’s new lover, Claudia—try to sort out the why and the how. And in the process, the characters are slowly revealed. Claudia (played by former Milwaukee Rep intern Greta Wohlrabe) is ambitious and desperate for a simpatico father figure. Daughter Sophie (Karen Estrada) explains things in terms of Women’s Studies generalizations. Honor, ever the poet, expresses her feelings in beautiful essentials that resonate beyond the theater walls. Gus, I’m afraid, in spite of Murray-Smith’s aspirations, comes off as a shallow and just plain silly: two days after he tells Honor he’s leaving, he talks to Claudia about spending the rest of their lives sailing the world in a yacht.
The play is at its best, in fact, when the women are speaking to each other, interrogating assumptions about relationships and the changes that feminism has wrought. They weigh the competing polarities of relationships: novelty vs. familiarity, security vs. risk, commitment vs. freedom.
Director Marie Kohler gets a satisfying sense of humanity on to the stage, mostly due to the assured performances of Laura Gordon and Brian Mani. Both give their characters a warmth and gravitas that is essential to the play’s impact. Through the work of Kohler and her actors, Honour transcends the play on the page, goes beyond the collection of erudite stock figures who live through the story and offer pithy and often insightful ideas about romance and relationships in the post-feminist age.
Photo: Laura Gordon and Brian Mani.
Photo by Ross Zentner
