Martin Millerchip THEATRE REVIEW Miracle Mother by Deborah Kimmett. An Arts Club Mainstage production directed by Pat Armstrong. To Oct. 22, Res: 687-1644. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! THE QUOTATION from Samuel Coleridge sums up my experience of the Arts Club’s Miracle Mother per- fectly. (Hey, it even has the word “miracle” in it, which playwright Deborah . Kimmett tends to throw _ around a lot in case we miss the point.) The production is bright and fast, the actors clever and fast and the writing is, weil, fast-paced. And one hour into the show I was looking at my watch and won- dering how much longer the mira- cle of mother and child bonding would take. ~ However, let me say at once that my reactions were clearly the minority position on opening night. The majority of the audience .. laughed and applauded tong and hard. But while I enjoyed much of what I saw and heard, the play ulti- mately failed to defrost the fridge that is my heart. The acting is uniformly excel- lent with Nora McLelian’s Kathleen a stand-out verging on the stand-up. Kimmett’s script gives us a career-conscious older woman unexpectedly pregnant for the sec- ond time and on the point of deliv- ering what will barely be a two- pound preemie. Married to a cell phone and a husband she met in detox, Kathleen is forced to confront long-lapsed issues of Catholic dogma and the unhappy childhood she has spent $9,000 in therapy to find out about. Her mother Alice (Florence Photo Glan Erikson NOATH SHORE actress Suzanne Ristic (left) is the calm in the centre of the whirlpool of emotion, dogma and comedy that is Miracle Mother at the Arts Club Mainstage. Paterson) has brought her to the hospital with the best food, and is on hand to aggravate and know better and, of course, she turns out to have had rotten experiences with her mother, too. So we’ ve got mothers and daughters, wives and husbands, faith and dogma, religion and sci- ence. Got to be a play in there some- where, right? And have I mentioned the drug- induced dream and fantasy sequences that allow a manic, sur- real quality to spill over the pro- duction? Hysteria is only a heartbeat away as ideas and actors zoom around (and especially across) Carole Klemm and Ted Roberts’ church-of-science set. A deliciously heretical guest appearance by the original miracle mother herself, the “virgin” Mary, and having one actor (the excellent David Marr) play every male hos- pital worker from the TV repair- man to the neonatologist are just two of the devices that Kimmett employs in he: pursuit of comedy. Director Pat Armstrong helps Kimmett throw all this stuff at the fan by employing a brutally fast pace. There is never a moment for pause and reflection as Kathieen lurches from fantasy to crisis with only demerol and the repertoire of a night-club comedienne to sus- tain her. And that, for me, was the prob- lem. I have a son at whose miracu- ious birth I was present. His moth- er is a fervently fearful Catholic who both loves and hates her moth- er. 1am as familiar with the issues in Kimmett’s play as it is possible for a non-birthing person to be and yet I was never engaged by them. Instead, with the exception of Suzanne Ristic’s solidly grounded nun/doctor, I felt [ was watching some futuristic comedy-club episode and the biggest question in my mind at the end of the evening was whether it was the script or the production that hadn’t worked for me, Kimmett obscures theme with themes and woefully underwrites character in favor of comedy (mother Alice and husband Brian in particular) but Armstrong’s fre- netic approach to the business of the play exzcerbales the problem and distanced me from the charac- ters. Bonding never became the dom- inant issue that it should have been, with the result that tension was intermittent at best and the produc- tion felt like it had two endings. 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